


Memories of a Stolen Place

by glorious_spoon



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, First Time, Fix-It, Getting Together, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Memory Loss, Miscommunication, Stanley Uris Lives, The Turtle CAN Help Us (IT)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-16 02:47:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29075058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glorious_spoon/pseuds/glorious_spoon
Summary: It’s like looking through one of those old View-Master toys. Two disparate images merge into a three-dimensional whole: the cute, mouthy guy he met at a hotel bar and the foul-mouthed, fast-talking kid he's just starting to remember.Eddie fucking Kaspbrak, half-forgotten one night stand and the absolute love of Richie’s teenage life.Or: Richie hooks up with a stranger while he’s on tour. A year later, he walks into the Jade of the Orient and remembers Eddie Kaspbrak.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 46
Kudos: 329





	1. Moments of magic and wonder

**Author's Note:**

> This is a mix of book-verse and movie-verse canon; characterizations are mostly movie-verse, but some of the backstory and mythology is from the books.
> 
> Title is from [Waves](https://open.spotify.com/track/0hNOP5epEjX8Zj5aSGr6JU) by Dean Lewis.

Eddie has been shooting him increasingly weird looks throughout dinner. It’s to the point that Richie, who generally cultivates weird looks on purpose, has discreetly checked to see if his fly is open no less than three times. It isn’t. Nobody else has been staring, anyway. It’s just Eddie, beetle-browed, peering at him with an incredulous expression that’s honestly starting to get under his skin a little.

It’s almost a relief when he gets up to use the bathroom and Eddie follows him out into the hallway, shoulders hunched under his neat little polo shirt. His fashion sense hasn’t changed at all since he was thirteen, it’s incredible. Richie almost expects to see a fanny-pack at his hip instead of the cellphone in its sensible leather holder. He looks like a fucking parody of a suburban dad, and it’s honestly embarrassing how much Richie still wants to jump on his dick.

“Hey, uh,” Eddie says quietly once they’re in the back hallway, within sight of the rest of the table but not earshot. “Can I talk to you?”

“Depends,” Richie retorts, turning to lean back against the wall and folding his arms. Eddie is _still_ wearing that look. “Are you going to quit looking at me like I’m a fucking alien?”

“I’m not—”

“Don’t even start, man, you’re not subtle.”

Eddie makes a face. He’s blushing, which is cute, and also baffling. “Sorry. I didn’t mean—okay, so. Weird question, but did you do a show in Chicago last August?”

“Dude, have you been following my act? I don’t know if I should be flattered or creeped out.” He knows which one he is, he definitely knows, but he’s not telling Eddie that.

“Could you just answer the fucking question?”

“Yeah, I did a thing at the Laugh Factory. There are clips on Youtube. Why?”

Eddie nods. He’s holding himself very still, but there’s a vaguely manic air to him all the same, like some kind of internal vibration has reached a dangerous resonance. “And you stayed at the Four Seasons?”

“Yeah…” Richie says slowly, because that is definitely not publicly available information. There’s no way Eddie could possibly know that, unless—

Unless.

The guy at the hotel bar. Cute guy, wearing a business suit, a conference badge and a scowl while he stared at his gin gimlet like it had personally wronged him. Richie had skipped the afterparty and was feeling jittery and irritable the way he sometimes did after shows, all wound up with nowhere to put all the energy, so he slid into the empty seat and made some dumb crass joke that he can’t even remember now, and the guy turned to him with a frown drawing his dark eyebrows down, and said—

* * *

Chicago - 2015

* * *

“—you’re not fucking funny, asshole.”

Richie cackled, leaning over the counter to signal the bartender. “Oh, baby, we just met, save the sweet talk for our second date.”

Short, Cute, and Cranky scowled even harder, and Richie figured he was about to pop out of his seat and storm off. Or take a swing, if Richie was really lucky, but given the suit and the venue, probably not. Richie could goad just about anyone into punching him, given enough time, but a suit at a conference would probably take some actual effort, and Richie was too fucking old for that shit these days, post-show jitters or no.

Besides, Steve was about one more embarrassing public stunt away from dropping his contract. He could behave for one night. Probably.

The short guy neither punched Richie nor stormed off. Instead, when the bartender showed up to take Richie’s order, he downed his drink in one gulp, set the glass on the bartop, and said, “Could I get another one of the same, please? He’s paying for it.”

He hooked a thumb at Richie, who stared back at him, astonished and delighted. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“If you’re going to sit here and bother me, you can pay for my drink,” the guy said, and turned to face Richie for the first time. “Is that a problem? Because if it is, you can feel free to fuck off.”

Richie grinned at the clearly-discomfited bartender and slid his credit card over. “Put it on my tab. And a Jack and Coke. Thanks so much.”

“Jesus,” the guy muttered, setting his elbows on the table and then resting his forehead in the cradle of his hands. His cuffs pulled back to display bony wrists and lightly tanned forearms; his nails were neatly manicured, and there was a white band of skin on his third finger where a wedding ring would normally go. No wedding ring to be seen. His hair looked like it had been neatly gelled at some point, but it was disheveled like someone had been tugging on it.

“Oh, okay, I get it. I just stumbled into a midlife crisis in progress.” The guy shot Richie a narrow glare, and Richie shrugged. “Hey, man, I’m just saying. It’s either that, or you got fired while you were out of town at the—” he squinted at the badge around the guy’s neck. “GARP Convention? That sounds like some kind of weird kink thing. Or maybe a fish—”

“Jesus Christ, what are you, twelve?” the guy asked, but his lips were twitching. Score. “Global Association of Risk Professionals. And it’s a conference, not a convention. And I didn’t get fired.”

“You know, if I were you, I would have just gone with the fish kink thing,” Richie said as the bartender deposited their drinks in front of them. The bar was filling up, but tucked into the dim corner next to the wine rack and some incomprehensible piece of modern art, they seemed to be in their own little bubble.

That was a dangerous way to think when he was already in the mood to do something reckless and dumb. He took a sip of his drink, bubbles breaking on his tongue, then stuck his hand out. “Richie.”

The guy stared at his hand, then at his face, with a wary expression like he thought he was being made fun of. Which, okay, he was a little bit.

“My name,” Richie added, just to be an asshole. “Usually, this would be the point when you tell me yours.”

“This whole situation is taking on a serial killer vibe.”

“I could still stuff you in the trunk of my car if you don’t tell me your name, dude.” Richie hummed thoughtfully, then added, “Actually, I probably couldn’t. It’s a Mustang convertible, so… I mean, you’re little, but you’re not that little.”

“Of course you drive a fucking Mustang,” the guy sighed.

“It’s a rental. Why, what’s wrong with Mustangs?”

“Other than the fact that they handle like bumper cars?” The guy dropped his head into his palms briefly, then lifted it. “Edward.”

“ _Edward_ , seriously? Now who’s the serial killer?”

“It’s literally my name.” The guy lifted his conference tag, which did read _EDWARD K—_

A sharp needle of pain slid through Richie’s skull right behind his eyes. He blinked, and it faded just as fast. “Okay, but does _literally_ anybody call you that?”

“My coworkers.”

“Anybody you like?”

“Who said I liked you?”

“Well,” Richie pointed out. “You haven’t decked me yet.”

That got him a genuine smile. There were dimples. Richie was _absolutely_ going to do something stupid if he kept this up. “Eddie.”

“Eddie, Eddie Spaghetti—”

“Don’t fucking push it.”

“I don’t know how to do anything else.”

“Yeah, I can tell.”

Richie grinned at him, and Eddie grinned back, and there was a spark of—something. Not attraction, not exactly. That was there too, but this was more like—deja vu. A strange, dislocated sense of familiarity.

“So,” Eddie said, just as Richie was opening up his mouth to ask. “Sorry, this is weird, but do I know you from somewhere?”

“I’m guessing you weren’t at the show, then.” Not a surprise. This dude looked like he had better taste than to follow some stale dick-joke hack. It was a nice change, actually; if Richie wanted people kissing his ass about his shitty act right now, he’d still be at the afterparty.

“Huh?”

“Comedian,” Richie said, pointing to his chest with one hand and doing a little jazz-hand thing with the other. He felt stupid about it a moment later, and reached for his drink, clutching the sweating glass against his palm instead of drinking it. “I’m in town for a gig.”

“Huh,” Eddie said again, his eyes narrowing. “You don’t seem like you’d be that funny.”

Richie burst out laughing, a real belly-laugh, startled and loud enough that it drew a few stares. “Oh, man. Fuck. You don’t pull any punches, do you? Anyway, I just tell the jokes, I don’t write them.”

“So you’re more like a ventriloquist dummy, then,” Eddie retorted, and there was that prickle again. A slide of pain behind his eyes, a memory fading in like an ill-tuned radio.

“ _—gonna be the greatest ventriloquist act of all time, just wait.”_

 _“Okay, I can_ literally _see your lips moving right now—”_

“Some kind of dummy, anyway,” Richie said, focusing again. He pushed his glasses up to rub at the bridge of his nose. “You’re kind of an asshole, huh?”

He didn’t really mean it as an insult, but he was still expecting a scowl and another endearingly cutting retort. Instead, Eddie sighed. “Yeah, I guess. Yeah. I really am sometimes.”

“Is that why…” Richie trailed off, then nodded at Eddie’s conspicuously bare ring finger.

“Ah.” Eddie picked his hand up, stared at it as though he’d never seen it before, then set it back down on the bar top. “Uh, not exactly?”

“So, this is the mid-life crisis thing, huh? You want to talk about it?”

Eddie gave him a sidelong look. “You don’t even know me, man. Do you really want to sit here and listen to my marital problems?”

“You’re not wearing a ring,” Richie pointed out, aware that he was pushing it and unsure why. There was just something about this guy, in his rumpled suit with his missing wedding band and his haunted dark eyes, some needling impulse that wouldn’t let him let it go. “Are they still marital problems, or are they more like ‘oh God oh fuck I’m going to bankrupt myself on a divorce lawyer’ problems?”

“No—maybe. I don’t know. Fuck.” Eddie drained his drink, then dropped his face into his hands. Muffled, he said, “We had a big fight right before I left. She doesn’t—she hates it when I go to these out of town things. She’s always afraid that the plane will crash, or I’ll get food poisoning at the buffet, or I’ll get kidnapped and stuffed in the trunk of a car—”

“So I shouldn’t have led with that, huh?”

Eddie buried his face deeper into his palms. His shoulders shook. For a moment, Richie thought he was _crying_ , which would have been a new low even for him. Getting punched by a cute guy in a bar was at least something he could spin into a joke, albeit one of the bitter self-hating ones that he’d never say out loud to another person.

“Oh, fuck,” Eddie gasped, and Richie realized that he wasn’t crying at all: he was laughing breathlessly into his hands, his face red and squished up like it hurt. Maybe it did. He didn’t really seem like the kind of guy who did a lot of laughing.

“Uh,” Richie said. He lifted his hand, dropped it, then set it gingerly on Eddie’s heaving shoulder. The bartender was giving them a funny look from over by the taps, but he ignored it. It was probably mostly because Eddie was having a minor nervous breakdown right here in the corner of a hotel bar, anyway. “You okay there, man?”

“I have no fucking idea,” Eddie managed, dropping his hands. He swiped at his streaming eyes, then scrubbed his hands through his already very disheveled hair. “I, uh. I was hosting a roundtable on operational resilience this afternoon—you know, disaster recovery planning, that kind of thing—”

“Sounds riveting,” Richie interjected.

“Very funny. It’s a big deal for my career, or it would have been. Do you want to hear this or not?”

“Okay, okay.” Richie nodded seriously and propped his chin on his hand, affecting a fascinated expression. “Go on. Please.”

Eddie gave him another narrow-eyed look, then said, “I had my phone in my jacket pocket, you know, on the back of my chair, and like an _idiot_ I left it on vibrate instead of silent…”

“Oh, no.”

“Yeah. Myra—my wife—she kept calling in the middle of it. Over and over. So finally one of the other speakers told me I should check in case something was really wrong, and what was I supposed to say, that my wife just doesn’t know how to fucking let anything go? She knew I was presenting, she always has the whole conference schedule memorized. So I stepped out in the hallway to talk to her and we—uh. It got loud, and basically the entire conference room heard me tell her that it was over and I wasn’t coming home. And then I—I dropped my phone, and it broke, and—” He rubbed his hands over his face and sighed, the frenetic energy of his words burning out all at once. “And I have no idea why the fuck I’m telling you any of this.”

“I just have one of those faces that makes people want to spill their deepest darkest secrets,” said Richie, who absolutely did not. If anything, he had one of those faces that made people assume he was a serial killer. “Seriously, though. I’m sorry. It sounds like a bad scene.”

“Literally the most professionally embarrassing thing I’ve ever done in my life. I don’t know how I’m going to show my face at work on Monday.”

“Yeah, okay, I guess that, too. But she called to pick a fight when she knew you were presenting? That’s kinda fucked up, man.”

“I—yeah. I guess. It seems ridiculous to just end things over that, though. We’ve been married for almost six years, I’m just saying—that’s crazy, right?”

“I don’t know,” Richie said slowly. He was way out of his depth here, and more than that—he was starting to suspect that his motives weren’t entirely altruistic. Eddie was hot. And lonely, and conflicted, and—nope. _Be a decent human for once in your life, Trashmouth._ “From what you said, it doesn’t exactly sound like it was a one-time thing. Maybe this was just the last straw.”

Eddie was just watching him. The messy hair and the rumpled suit and the empty glass at his elbow gave him an appealingly disheveled look, like he’d just stepped off the set of a Tennessee Williams play. His shoulder was very warm under Richie’s hand, and Richie became aware, a beat too late, that they were making some fairly intense eye contact.

“Maybe,” Eddie said finally, like he was testing the shape of the word in his mouth.

Richie cut his eyes away and let his hand drop. “I mean, I’m just some asshole, you don’t have to listen to me.”

“I don’t think you’re an asshole.” Eddie reached for his glass, and only seemed to realize it was empty when he got it halfway up to his mouth. He set it down again. “You ever been married, Rich?”

The unthinking nickname sent something hot slicing through Richie. He cleared his throat. “Uh, no. I’m a free agent, baby.”

Eddie nodded. “I—don’t think I ever should have gotten married in the first place.”

“Why did you? Like, don’t take this the wrong way, but it doesn’t sound great.”

“I don’t know. Isn’t that nuts? I honestly don’t know. It was just—we were introduced by one of my coworkers, and we dated for a while, and it just seemed like the next step. I don’t even remember deciding to do it. It just felt like one day I woke up on this ride I couldn’t get off of.” Eddie spun the glass in his fingers, contemplating it. “I’m pretty sure I’m not even attracted to—”

He broke off abruptly. The glass rattled in his hand. He glanced up, a quick nervous look that lodged in the pit of Richie’s stomach like a stone because of how familiar it was. That particular flavor of fear.

 _I’m not even attracted to women._ Yeah. He knew that one.

“Shit,” Eddie muttered, starting to stand. “I should—”

“Look, do you want to have another drink?” Richie asked, fast and reckless. Too exposed, and worth it for the way Eddie paused, then sank back into his seat. He gave Richie another, longer look. Wide dark eyes scanning his face like he was searching for something.

“I don’t know,” he said, and there seemed to be a weight to the words.

“My treat. Seriously, man. You seem like you’re having a hell of a night.”

“It’s, um.” Eddie glanced around the bar, which had been getting louder and more packed as they talked. He licked his lips, then looked back at Richie. “It’s starting to get kind of busy in here?”

Richie took a breath, then let it out, then said, “There’s a minibar in my room. If you want.”

“Oh,” Eddie breathed.

A faint blush was spreading across his cheeks, so he’d definitely read between the lines there just fine. He looked down and took a couple of heaving breaths, very clearly having some kind of internal debate with himself. Richie just waited, and tried not to let on that his insides felt like coiled springs. Bright and jangling and nervous as the kid he hadn’t been in too long to remember.

Finally, Eddie’s jaw firmed. He turned back to Richie and nodded sharply, like he was sealing a business deal. It was ridiculous and entirely charming. “Yeah. Yeah, okay, let’s do that.”

* * *

Richie settled his tab and stuffed the receipt in his pocket, grateful that it was busy enough by now that nobody was paying him much attention. The benefit of being somewhere other than L.A.: nobody expected to see a celebrity—even a cut-rate one like Richie—in a hotel bar, so they tended to slide right past any glitches of momentary recognition.

Most of the times he did this, he felt horribly exposed the whole way back to his room. Like any random passerby who glanced at him keeping a measured distance from another man outside the elevators might see a sign reading _GAY HOOKUP IN PROGRESS_ and then, like, take a baseball bat to his head or something. An old sick fear with no basis in reality that he could remember, but it lingered nonetheless.

Right now, somehow, there was none of that. He glanced at Eddie as the elevator doors opened, and Eddie smiled back up at him. His cheeks were still flushed, his hands tucked into the pockets of his suit pants. He was—

— _cute, cute, cute—_

—desperately attractive, enough that Richie was tempted to abandon all common sense and kiss him right there in the mirrored elevator while the lower floors swept away beneath them with a rush of air and the smooth hum of hydraulics. Instead, he shoved his hands in his pockets and leaned against the far wall.

“So,” he said. “Come here often?”

Eddie ducked his head, looking embarrassed. He was smiling, though. “Uh, no.”

“Well, at ze Four Seasons we ‘ave only ze finest—” Eddie’s shoulders started to shake with laughter, but the elevator doors opened before Richie could really get going. He cleared his throat, dropping the Voice. “This is me.”

“Yeah, I watched you push the button,” Eddie said dryly, following him out of the elevator and down the hallway, which was mercifully empty.

“Observant.”

“I just want to know where I am in case you turn out to be a serial killer after all.”

“You usually go home with guys you think might be serial killers?”

“No,” Eddie said, more seriously. He took a deep breath as they came to a stop outside Richie’s door. “I’ve never done anything like this before.”

“Oh,” Richie said, softer. He had a sudden urge to—pull Eddie into a hug, bury his face in his hair, an impulse to _touch_ that seemed to come from someplace deeper than simple attraction.

He fumbled his keycard out before he could do something too stupid and public, got the door open and stepped aside to let Eddie into the room. He watched Eddie tilt his head, taking it in: a really obnoxiously nice suite, the big picture window open on a dazzling view of the night city from twelve stories up. Crowded little sitting area around the TV, and then the king-sized bed with its snowy mountain of pillows and fluffy duvet. Richie kicked his shoes off and wandered over to the mostly-untouched minibar. The crystal glasses were still wrapped in plastic. Above the small counter was a landscape print that had caught his eye when he first checked in: a sunlit forest encroaching on a deep green lake, a turtle sunning itself on a mossy log in the foreground.

He picked at the plastic covering the glasses, listened to Eddie’s soft footsteps on the carpet behind him. An unfamiliar nervousness thrummed through him.

“So, did you want that drink?” he asked, looking back.

Eddie reached for him as he turned, his warm hands landing on Richie’s shoulders. He leaned up, and Richie was so startled that when Eddie’s lips met his it took him a moment too long to kiss back. Long enough that Eddie jerked away like he’d touched a hot stove.

“Oh, shit,” he breathed, flush deepening into something that looked almost painful, hands lifting. A hint of fear had slipped back into his expression. “Did I just totally misread—”

“No, fuck, of course not,” Richie said quickly, and leaned down again, too quick, misaligned, noses bumping before he managed to slot his mouth against Eddie’s. A lingering kiss, a hint of tongue slipped against Eddie’s lips. Eddie opened up for him with a sigh that sounded relieved, his fingers digging into Richie’s shoulders.

“Oh,” he breathed when they finally parted.

“Sorry,” Richie murmured, and kissed him again. “I just thought you might want another drink first. You know. To maintain plausible deniability.”

“If I wanted to maintain plausible deniability, I wouldn’t have come up to your hotel room in the first place,” Eddie said, very dryly. He was still blushing, but there was a spark of humor in his eyes now. “I don’t want another drink.”

“Yeah? What do you want?”

“I—” Eddie breathed out a quiet, self-deprecating laugh. “I really haven’t ever done anything like this before. I don’t know how any of it is supposed to work.”

That still covered a lot of potential bases, from _I’ve never hooked up with a stranger after ten minutes of bickering at a hotel bar_ to _I’ve never been with a guy before_ , but he had a suspicion that pushing it would just make Eddie clam up.

Instead, he slid his fingers inside Eddie’s open jacket, pushing it slightly off his shoulders. “Take this off?”

Eddie’s breath caught, and then he nodded and let Richie slide the jacket the rest of the way off. Richie draped it over the back of the chair instead of dropping it on the floor like he normally might have; Eddie struck him as the kind of guy who could get easily side-tracked by things like that.

His shirt was white broadcloth, neatly ironed but starting to wilt against his skin. Richie bent his head to kiss just above the crisp fold of his collar, hooking a finger under his tie. “This, too?”

Eddie swallowed with an audible click, then reached up to loosen the tie and tug it off, tossing it on top of his jacket. His hands settled tentatively at Richie’s hips as Richie got to work on his shirt, undoing the buttons down to his waist before tugging the tails out from his pants and finishing the job.

“Kinda thought you might have those shirt garters,” he murmured, pushing it open to reveal the undershirt beneath. “You seem like the type.”

“They’re uncomfortable. And sort of kinky, don’t you think?”

“Uh, _yeah_ , that was my point.”

“Sorry to disappoint,” Eddie said, shrugging his shirt off and laying it neatly over his jacket and tie, leaving him in just a ribbed white undershirt.

Richie skimmed his hands up Eddie’s arms, tracing the graceful lines of the muscle with his fingers before leaning down to kiss him again. “I am really _seriously_ not disappointed right now. Although you might be, Jesus. Figures you’d be a gym-rat.”

“I like to work out.”

“Yeah, I don’t. Fair warning.”

“I don’t mind.”

Eddie seemed, ironically, more confident about all this now that nudity was imminent. His hands landed on Richie’s shoulders again, pushing his jacket off and letting it drop on the floor. Richie had a brief and completely insane impulse to complain about that—he’d folded _Eddie’s_ clothes neatly, after all—before he stopped himself. Eddie was pushing his t-shirt up, anyway, and Richie let go of him long enough to tug it off, nearly knocking his glasses off in the process. He grabbed at them before they could fall, shoved them back onto his face, and found that Eddie was staring up at him.

The expression on his face was intent, almost fascinated. Richie breathed out slowly. “Disappointed yet?”

“No,” Eddie said, and settled his hands on Richie’s hips. “Did you—” he glanced up, then back down, and Richie would have called it deliberately coquettish if it weren’t for the fact that Eddie was blushing again and seemed almost genuinely overwhelmed, which was both baffling and flattering. “Did you want to take this to the bed?”

“That’s pretty forward of you,” Richie said, “but also, yes. Definitely.”

“It’s not _forward_ of me, unless coming here in the first place was forward,” Eddie grumbled. He let go of Richie to unlace his oxford shoes and tug them off, folding his socks neatly inside. There was something inexplicably charming about the fussy domesticity of it.

“There hasn’t been any coming. Not yet, anyway. But I’m very optimistic about our prospects.” He grinned when Eddie took a shaky breath. “Corporate dirty talk does it for you?”

“ _No_ ,” Eddie said, but there was that glint of humor in his eyes again. It made Richie want to kiss him, and so he did, slowly, sweetly, taking his time about it. He was hard, or most of the way there, but it didn’t seem that urgent yet. There was something about this that made him want to take his time about it, to savor it—a sort of tender half-forgotten ache.

He let Eddie steer him backward toward the bed without really breaking the kiss, and fell back onto the mountain of snowy bedclothes while Eddie tugged his undershirt off over his head and unbuckled his belt. He popped the top button of his pants, then paused, and sat down next to Richie.

“Want me to do the honors?” Richie asked him. “Not that I’d say no to a striptease.”

“That wasn’t a _striptease_ —”

“I wasn’t complaining, dude.” Richie settled a hand on Eddie’s shoulder, then trailed it down over his chest. His neat, compact body, his chest lightly dusted with hair, a dark happy-trail under his belly button leading down. He traced the line of it with his fingers, watching Eddie’s face for any sign that he was about to freak out and, seeing none, tugged his zipper down. His underwear was plain black cotton, distended by his erection and wet around the head. Richie rubbed his thumb over it, watched Eddie take a shaky breath and then let it out. “Still good?”

“Yeah, it’s good. It’s—hang on, let me just—” he rolled away, but it was only to shove his pants down and kick them off over the end of the bed, leaving him in just his sensible black boxer briefs. He hooked his thumbs in the waistband, glanced up at Richie, a sort of quick assessing look. Richie tried to arrange his face so that he didn’t look like the wolf from the old Looney Tunes shorts. He wasn’t sure he actually managed it, but Eddie shoved his underwear down anyway, blushing but determined.

“Holy shit,” Richie said seriously, and got one of those narrow-eyed looks in return. It probably said something about him that he found it so hot to be glared at like that by a dude who had his dick fully on display, but there it was.

It was a nice dick, anyway, to match the rest of Eddie. Gently curved, leaking at the tip. Eddie breathed out sharply when Richie dragged his fingers over it, gathering precome and using it as slick to stroke him.

“You always get this wet?” he asked, sliding down a little to take the head in his mouth. Hot skin and the faint taste of salt and soap. He sucked lightly at the glans before sinking the rest of the way down. Eddie made another shocked little sound, his fingers settling lightly in Richie’s hair.

“Sometimes,” he said breathlessly. “Sometimes, if I’m really—oh fuck. Fuck, Richie.”

His name sounded really good in that breathless tone. Richie hummed, pushing his hips against the bed to get some relief.

“Oh,” Eddie breathed. “Oh, is that—can I see you?”

He pulled off. “Hm?”

“Can you take these off?” Eddie asked, sounding more confident, as he leaned down to slide his fingers under the waistband of Richie’s jeans. “I want to see you.”

Richie took a breath, let it out, and then said, “Yeah, okay.”

He rolled away onto his back, unbuttoning his jeans and lifting his hips to shove them and his boxers off all at once. Eddie stared down at him, his eyes drifting over Richie’s face, down over his torso, lingering on his cock. It was that same fascinated, disbelieving look that he’d worn when he took Richie’s shirt off earlier, and it made Richie feel hot all over. He dropped a hand to stroke himself once, and Eddie let out a soft sound, then licked his lips, then tentatively put his hand over Richie’s.

“Can I, uh...?” He trailed off.

“I feel like I should make you finish that sentence, but the answer to just about anything right now is yes,” Richie said. “Go ahead. _Please_.”

Eddie huffed laughter, then pushed Richie’s hand out of the way so that he could stroke him. Light, lingering, exploratory touches, a little too dry and not enough to actually get him off, but that was fine, Richie thought dazedly, watching Eddie lick his lips while he stared at what his own hand was doing. That was just fine. If Eddie wanted to edge him like this all night, that would be fine too.

“Is this okay?” Eddie asked.

“This is very fucking okay,” Richie managed. “But, um. I have lube?”

Eddie’s eyes shot back to his face, something hot in them. His grip firmed enough to make Richie gasp, rocking his hips up. “Where?”

“Bag—my bag, on the floor.” He waved a hand vaguely at it. “Right-hand pocket.”

Eddie let go of him to lean over the bed and rummage through it, and Richie wrapped a hand around his cock, not really stroking so much as holding himself, steadying. Of course, then Eddie came back up with the bottle of lube _and_ a condom, and Richie groaned, his fingers tightening, then said breathlessly, “Kinda presumptuous, don’t you think?”

“We don't—” Eddie broke off, pouring lube into his hand before wrapping it around Richie’s cock again. It was so much better like this, a slick hot slide, Eddie’s narrow fingers rubbing over the head on every stroke. Richie got lost in the sensation for a minute, enough that he’d almost lost track of what they were talking about by the time Eddie said, “We don't have to. But you have condoms, so.”

His hand slid down again, tightened, twisted slightly on the way back up. Richie tried to catch his breath. “Are you asking if you can fuck me?”

Eddie was flushed, his eyes huge, the hand not touching Richie wrapped around his own cock, which was slick and leaking over his fingers. The fucking picture of debauchery. It was beautiful. “Is that how you like it?”

“I like it either way. Do you _want_ to fuck me?”

“Yeah,” Eddie breathed, pitching forward so that he could kiss Richie, frantic and messy. “Yeah, I want that, can I?”

“Of fucking course you can, Jesus. Give me the lube.”

Eddie picked it up, then hesitated. “Actually, can I—?”

“Fuck,” Richie breathed, squeezing his eyes shut. And then, “Yeah, okay. Have you done this before?”

“I mean. To myself, yeah.”

 _There_ was a mental image to ruminate on, but in the meantime, Eddie was pouring more lube onto his fingers, rubbing them together to warm them before he slid them down and back. Richie spread his legs to give him better access, and cursed in a low, breathless voice when Eddie slowly started working a finger into him.

Like with the handjob, he started off tentative and exploratory and gained confidence fast. Two fingers, and then three, hot and slick and twisting inside until he found the spot that made Richie’s breath punch out of him.

“Fuck, fuck,” he chanted, breathless. “Fuck, please, more—”

“It’s good?” Eddie asked, like he wasn’t currently watching Richie lose what little composure he had left, fucking himself down onto Eddie’s fingers as he worked a forth one in.

“Is it fucking— _yeah_ , it’s good,” Richie groaned, rolling his head back against the pillow. He wanted to watch Eddie’s face, but his eyes kept fluttering shut of their own accord. “If you want to fuck me you’d better do it now.”

Eddie groaned, then leaned over to kiss him again as he slid his fingers out. He wiped them on the sheets, then reached for the condom. Richie cracked his eyes open to watch him roll it onto himself and pour more lube into his hand, biting his lip with his eyes fluttering shut as he stroked it onto himself.

Richie shoved himself up toward the head of the bed, reaching out to snag a pillow and shove it under his hips. And then Eddie was kneeling between his legs, pushing them open with warm, lube-slick fingers before taking his cock in hand to guide it in. It was slow, agonizingly slow, and Richie was torn between bucking his hips to shove himself onto it and letting Eddie take his time.

“Okay, fuck,” he breathed, bracing one hand back against the headboard and rocking down after all, just a little. Eddie let out a long moan, and his hips jerked forward, seating him all at once. He braced himself against the bed, arched over Richie with his head hanging, taking deep, gulping breaths like he was the one who had to adjust to it.

 _How long has it been?_ Richie thought as Eddie started to move. He wanted to touch himself but knew that if he did this would all be over. _How long has it been since you got to feel good?_

“Fuck,” he murmured, breathless, moving with the slow deep roll of Eddie’s hips, gripping his thighs to feel the flex of muscle there with every thrust. He felt dazed with arousal, his whole body lit up and singing. “Oh, fuck, Eds, that’s so good—”

“Richie,” Eddie breathed, ragged, almost startled. “Richie, look at me.”

He opened his eyes to see Eddie staring down at him, wide-eyed and intent with his cheeks flushed and his hair all over the place, sweat-sheened and breathing hard and fucking beautiful, and Richie thought, dazed and without quite knowing that he thought it, _I know you, I know you_.

“Eddie,” he whispered, and for a moment he almost grasped— _something_. But then Eddie was moving again, his free hand stroking over Richie’s face and jaw, and it slipped back down beneath a haze of pleasure.

Afterward, they lay there tangled together in a sweaty sprawl of limbs. Richie’s hand had found its way to the center of Eddie’s back, resting lightly there and feeling the way his breath started to steady. Feeling—something, some strange tenderness that he couldn’t explain.

“Ugh,” Eddie mumbled into his shoulder eventually. “I’m all gross.”

“Lucky for you I like that in a man,” Richie said, and grinned when Eddie snorted against his skin. “You’re welcome to the shower, if you want.”

“Thanks,” Eddie said, peeling himself away. Richie watched sleepily as he slid off the bed. There was something luminous about him, the marble-statue quality of his skin in the soft light, his messy dark hair and the faint imprints of Richie’s hands spanning his thighs that might fade or might turn into bruises by the morning. “You want to join me?”

“In a minute,” Richie murmured, letting his eyes fall shut. He meant to open them again, but instead he found himself drifting in a quiet liminal space to the sound of the shower running, Eddie moving around his suite.

He woke briefly when the bed dipped. The room was dark and Eddie was a slightly darker shadow silhouetted against the window. “Rich,” he whispered. “You awake?”

“Hmm,” Richie mumbled, and patted at the mattress until he found Eddie’s knee. “Yeah.”

“You were sleeping in your glasses.”

“Shit, yeah. Oops.” He fumbled them off his face and stretched blindly toward the night-stand. Eddie took them out of his hand before he could drop them, set them down with a light clatter. “Thanks.”

“No problem.” Eddie took an audible breath. “Is it—okay if I stay here? Tonight?”

“Walk of shame is going to be way worse in the morning when there are people around,” Richie warned him, “but yeah. Of course you can.”

“Walk of shame,” Eddie repeated, in a tone that managed to be both amused and vaguely scandalized. The bed shifted as he settled back down against it. His leg slid out from under Richie’s hand, but a moment later he settled his palm on Richie’s shoulder and left it there, a warm anchoring weight. “Thanks.”

“Consider it payment for a fucking fantastic orgasm,” Richie yawned, and drifted off again to the sound of Eddie’s quiet laughter.

* * *

When he woke again, sunlight was spilling through the room, and the bed was empty. Soft footsteps moved through the room, and Richie rolled over onto his back with a groan. He really should have taken that shower; in the light of morning he felt sticky and sore and more than a little gross. He squinted at the blurry shape that was Eddie, then reached out to snag his glasses and slide them on.

“Hey,” Eddie said quietly. “Sorry, you don’t have to get up. I have to get going, my flight’s in a couple of hours.”

“Okay,” Richie murmured, closing his eyes again. He heard Eddie shuffling around the room, the scratch of a pen, and then the mattress sank. He opened his eyes. Eddie was back in his suit, his jacket and tie draped over his arm.

“I uh.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “My phone is broken at the moment, but I’ll get a new one once I’m back in New York. I wrote down my number.”

“Oh,” Richie said softly.

Eddie leaned down to kiss him, soft and brief, before straightening up. “So, yeah. I had fun.”

“You had _fun?_ ” Richie repeated, sleepily charmed.

Eddie was blushing. “Yeah. I did.”

“Oh, good. Me too.”

He watched as Eddie laced up his shoes and slipped out of the room with a final wave, then tugged his glasses off and buried his face back in the pillow as the A/C unit by the bar kicked on with a quiet puff of air. The scrap of paper with a phone number scribbled on it caught the air and drifted unseen to the floor, and then under the TV stand.

* * *

Richie woke up two hours later, scrambled around to pack, nearly missed his flight, and didn’t think of the guy from the bar last night until he was halfway to Philadelphia.

He could only call up a blurry memory of the man’s face, and couldn’t seem to attach a name to it, which—yeah, wasn’t all that unusual, for him. No big loss.

* * *

Derry - 2016

* * *

And then it’s a year later and a thousand miles away, and he’s standing in the dim back hallway of a Chinese restaurant in fucking Derry, Maine, staring at Eddie, who stares back at him with huge dark eyes.

It’s like looking through one of those old View-Master toys. Two disparate images merge into a three-dimensional whole: the cute, mouthy guy he met at a hotel bar and the foul-mouthed, fast-talking kid he's just starting to remember.

Eddie fucking Kaspbrak, half-forgotten one night stand and the absolute love of Richie’s teenage life.

“Oh, shit,” he breathes.

Eddie winces. “Yeah.”

“How the fuck—?”

“I don’t know.”

“Seriously, _how_ the fuck did we—did I—” Richie breaks off before he can say something even more incriminating. Eddie. It was _Eddie_ who snarked at him at the bar and came back to his room and kissed him and fucked him into his goddamn overpriced king-size mattress and then disappeared out of his life like it didn’t mean anything at all. How did he never make that connection when walking into the dining room an hour ago to see Eddie there felt like getting punched in the solar plexus?

“I _don’t fucking know_ ,” Eddie says, and it’s a consolation, if a small one, that he looks just as freaked out about this as Richie feels.

 _I know what you sound like when you come_ , Richie thinks, and also, _I know what it’s like to kiss you_ , which is somehow worse.

“You didn’t remember, though, right?” he asks, unsure what he wants the answer to be.

“Not until like twenty minutes ago,” Eddie says, and goes red. “When you did that thing with the shot.”

Richie blinks at him, then remembers tossing back a blowjob shot while Bev cheered him on, and also remembers sliding his mouth over Eddie’s cock while Eddie moaned his name. He can feel his own cheeks heat. “Oh.”

“Yeah.” Eddie swipes a hand over his mouth. “So, uh.”

“How did we not remember?” Richie asks again, and wants to smack himself when he hears how plaintive it comes out. Pathetic. _Exposed_ , in a way he’s never wanted to be.

“I think,” Eddie says slowly, and the color is leaching out of his face, leaving it wan. Anxious, instead of embarrassed. “I think we forgot a lot of things. Actually. I—”

His breath is starting to come faster, and the sound of it is a sense memory that’s lodged deep in Richie’s brain. The sound of Eddie’s panicky breathing, and something else: thin, high, evil laughter.

Red balloons rising into the sky. Eddie’s arm bent at a horrible angle, Paul Bunyan’s axe coming down, Georgie Denbrough, or something that looked like him, wearing a yellow slicker, dripping blood and shrieking at them in the cistern under Neibolt—

The house on Neibolt Street. The fucking clown.

_Pennywise._

He can see the same horrified comprehension dawning in Eddie’s eyes.

“Fuck,” he breathes, and before he can say anything else the private room behind them explodes into a cornucopia of nightmares.


	2. An echo lost in space

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNINGS FOR THIS CHAPTER: Discussions of suicide. 
> 
> No one dies by suicide in this fic, but Stan's attempt is referenced and Richie sees Bev's visions of all their deaths. If you'd like to skip that, you can stop when the turtle shows up and CTRL-F to _He lands on dirt this time._

Afterward, in the parking lot, there’s a lot of yelling. Richie contributes his fair share, pacing back and forth on the wet pavement and waving his hands like he can exorcise the thrum of terror inside him like that. It doesn’t really work, but it helps that Eddie is doing the same thing: they’ve always vibrated at the same frequency, a perfect feedback loop.

Worked like that during sex, too, which he’s doing his best not to think about. There’s nothing like impending death by demon clown when it comes to distractions, so small fucking blessings there.

It all more or less comes to a stop when Stan pulls his rental car up alongside the spot where they’re all shouting at each other. He cuts the engine and climbs out, looking like the ghost of a childhood Richie is just now starting to remember. The glasses are new and his hair is darker, visibly threaded with gray, but he’s still unmistakably Stanley Uris.

He gives them a quick little wave before tucking his hands back into the pockets of his sensible gray cardigan sweater. “Hey, guys.”

“Holy shit, Stanley,” Eddie says.

“Stan the Man,” Richie adds, and for a moment it’s just like crossing the parking lot to see Ben and Bev outside the restaurant, so much older than he remembers and so completely unchanged at the same time. The disbelieving joy: _How the hell did I ever forget you?_

Then the reality of their current situation reasserts itself, and he adds, “Shit, man, you missed all the screaming.”

“I doubt that,” Stan says, with a weird, wavering little smile. It’s Bev who moves first, throwing herself into Stan’s arms with such force that he actually staggers back a step.

“You made it,” she says, and there’s something so weighted about her tone that it gives Richie pause. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Mike go still.

Stan nods, burying his face in her hair. “Yeah, I—yeah. I made it.”

“I saw you,” Bev says. “In the Deadlights—”

Like with everything that’s happened this evening, there’s a sense of disorientation and then understanding. One moment, Richie has no idea what she’s talking about; the next, he remembers Bev floating blank-eyed in the stinking darkness of the cistern, red blood and red hair drifting up. Bev in the sun-washed Barrens, hunched in on herself and so fucking small now in his memory.

_“I saw all of us, all of us were there. But we were older, we were our parents’ age—”_

“Yeah,” Stan says again, rasping and raw.

“You were in the bathtub.”

He nods again. “Patty found me before I—she found me in time.”

Bev chokes on a sob and hauls him in closer. Her hands are fisted in his sweater so tightly Richie almost expects it to tear. “I’m glad. I’m so glad.”

Bill is there next, wrapping his arms around Stan and then clapping him on the shoulder as he pulls back. Stan returns the gesture, and his sleeve pulls up just enough to show a white bandage taped to the inside of his wrist. Understanding drops like a lead weight to the pit of Richie’s stomach.

“Jesus, Stanley,” he says, and hauls him into a tight hug. “So, hey, I know you just came all this way, but we’re getting out of here before we get fucking murdered. You in?”

“No,” Stan says tiredly, releasing him to step back. “No, I’m not.”

“Wait, what the fuck do you mean, _no?_ ”

“You probably don’t remember everything yet, but—” Eddie starts to say, and Stan cuts him off.

“I do. I remember. I remembered as soon as Mike called me. That’s why—” Stan closes his eyes and drags a hand over his face, the white bandage like a phosphorescent smear in the darkness. He drops it and looks over at Beverly. “We can’t leave, can we? Any of us.”

She shakes her head, wet-eyed, swaying toward Ben like she doesn’t even know she’s doing it. He settles a hand on her elbow, bracing. The way he’s looking at her is so nakedly tender that Richie has to look away, the pit of his stomach a snarled up tangle of miserable anxiety.

He wishes he had the balls to touch Eddie like that, but the very thought of it—of someone seeing that and guessing what he means by it—makes him feel like throwing up.

“What the fuck is _that_ supposed to mean?” Eddie snaps. “What do you mean, we can’t leave?”

“I don’t know about the rest of you, but I-I’m staying,” Bill says firmly, because of course he does. Big Bill never met a fucking fight he could back away from. Richie abruptly remembers taking a swing at him after Neibolt that first time, screaming while Mike hauled him back, and there’s a furious frightened part of him that wants to do that again. Just start fucking throwing punches, like that’ll fix anything.

He balls his hands into fists in his pockets instead. “Great, you guys stay here and die, see if I give a fuck. I’m getting my shit and getting the hell out of Dodge.”

“Let’s just…” Mike sighs. “Can we talk back at the Town House? I’ll explain everything I know, I promise. I have a plan. I really think we can do this, okay?”

“Yeah, too little too late, Mikey,” Richie says, and feels like shit about it a moment later when Mike flinches. He can’t bring himself to take it back, though. “Fine, whatever, I gotta get my suitcase anyway. Let’s go before anything else tries to fucking eat us.”

* * *

Back at the Town House, Beverly pours herself a shot at the empty bar, knocks it back, then pours another. That one she leaves on the bartop as she fumbles a pack of cigarettes out of her purse.

“Great idea,” Richie says, leaning over the bar to snag a bottle of whiskey. “Can I have one of those?”

She passes him the lit cigarette, swipes her eyes, lights another.

“Are you guys really supposed to be smoking in here?” Eddie asks.

“I’m pretty sure that’s not the most pressing fucking matter at the moment,” Richie retorts without meeting his eyes. He’s got a feeling like if he looks directly at Eddie right now he’s going to lose his shit in some very public and embarrassing way.

The rest of them are filing in; Ben settles at the bar next to Bev, at a distance that seems carefully calculated to be within arms’ reach without crowding her. Bill ends up on her other side. Stan drops into the uncomfortable-looking wingback chair and folds his hands tensely in his lap, and Mike pauses just inside the door. He keeps looking at them the way he has been, Richie thinks, since the start of all this: wide-eyed and wondering and like he can’t quite believe they’re all really here.

It’s making it really hard for Richie to stay as pissed off as he wants to.

Bill is the first one to speak. “W-what did you see?” he asks Bev quietly.

“I saw—Stan, I saw you in the bathtub. You had a razor, and—” She breaks off with a shuddering breath. Stan rubs his bandaged wrist without meeting any of their eyes. “I’ve been having dreams since the first time we fought it, horrible dreams, I just—I didn’t know what they meant. I didn’t remember any of you, but I’ve seen you die. So many times.” She lets out a shuddering breath of cigarette smoke, then tosses back her second shot. “I’ve seen all of us die like that.”

“It got inside us,” Mike says quietly. His arms are tucked against his body, his eyes sad. “Inside all of us. Like a virus. And for the past twenty-seven years, it’s been spreading.”

“I still don’t see why we should stick around here and let it kill us all quicker,” Richie interjects. He gestures sharply with his cigarette, trailing smoke through the air. “Let’s kick the can down the road, it’ll be another twenty-seven years before—”

“We’ll be _seventy_ , asshole,” Eddie retorts.

“None of us make it to seventy,” Bev says flatly. “None of us make it another twenty years. Either we kill it, or we all—” She glances at Stan, who has his eyes closed, a muscle ticking in his jaw, and doesn’t finish the sentence.

There’s a long silence. Then Richie stubs out his cigarette in the ashtray. “So what the fuck are we supposed to do? Because I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m not going after a monster with a fucking baseball bat this time around.”

Bev laughs raggedly, her eyes closed.

“Do you remember the smokehole?” Mike asks.

“In the clubhouse,” Ben says, nodding. Something has softened the tension in his face, a kind of gentle remembrance. For a moment, Richie can almost see him as he was then, round-cheeked and chubby, directing them all through the construction with an assurance that he never seemed to have at any other time. “I remember.”

“Mike, y-you and Richie were the only ones who saw anything,” Bill says, and Richie makes a face, pouring himself another shot.

He doesn’t really want to remember that. The strangling smoke, the expanding darkness, Mike’s sweaty hand clutched in his _._ The torn-open sky and the terrible, hungry _thing_ that came through it.

“Yeah, and a lot of fucking good that did,” he says out loud. “Great, so it’s an alien. Doesn’t help us kill the fucking thing, does it? It sure as hell didn’t the last time.”

“I’ve been doing some research,” Mike says. “There are herbal compounds that can help open our minds to—”

Richie chokes on a laugh. “I’m sorry, your plan is for us to all get ritually stoned? I could have stayed in Pasadena for this shit.”

“Richie,” Ben says quietly.

“No, you know what, fuck you. This is bullshit.”

“Do you have a better plan?” Mike asks. “I think this will work. I think we were all brought together for a reason—”

“L-lucky seven,” Bill murmurs.

“Exactly. I wasn’t sure—I wasn’t sure when I called if you’d all make it back. But you did— _we_ did, and I really think that if we do this, all of us together, we can find a way to beat it.”

Richie lifts his head and looks around the room. There’s a depressing lack of dissent on all the faces he can see. Even Eddie gives him a halfhearted little shrug and doesn’t say anything.

And the worst thing is, they’re not wrong. He knows it. The fucking gears of destiny started churning once they all met; he’s always known that this was something bigger than him. Bigger than any of them, maybe. That’s why it had to make them forget.

It’s Stan who finally speaks, quiet and trembling, into the silence. “I hate this, but. We made it this far. We need to end it, or—”

He doesn’t finish. Doesn’t really have to.

“God, fuck all of you,” Richie sighs, but he can hear that the fight has gone out of his voice. “Fine. Let’s all go smoke up for the greater good. Can’t be worse than anything I’ve put in my body for recreational purposes.”

He happens to be looking Eddie’s way as he says it, and so he sees Eddie blush suddenly red. Their eyes meet briefly before Richie turns very deliberately back toward the bar, snags the whiskey bottle, and takes it down to the far end while the rest of them get to discussing the logistics of their impending suicide run at an interdimensional demon. He listens long enough to make sure that they’re not planning on traipsing out to the Barrens tonight, and then tunes the rest of it out and sets about getting methodically drunk.

“Hey,” Bev says a few minutes later, sidling up to him. “Are you okay?”

“Fuckin’ peachy, Molly Ringwald,” Richie mumbles into his glass.

“God, I forgot about that. You were always such an asshole when we were kids.”

“Yeah, I haven’t changed much.”

“I don’t think any of us have.” Bev twists her hands together, rubbing at her wrists; there are bruises blooming on her pale skin. Bruises in the shape of fingerprints. A pale strip of skin on her finger where a wedding band should go. “Do you think any of us really got to grow up at all after we left?”

“I know I didn’t,” Richie says. He nods toward her wrists. “What about you?”

“Oh,” she says. She rubs the bruises, then lets her hands drop, fingers splaying out on the bartop. “That’s over. It’s over, I left him.”

“Your husband.”

“He’s a real bastard,” she says, and digs another cigarette out of her bag. She makes half a dozen fumbling attempts at lighting it before Richie holds out his hand. She drops the lighter into it, and he flicks it, touching the flame to the end of her cigarette as she inhales shakily. “Thanks.”

“Hey,” he says, handing the lighter back. “Good for you. Seriously.”

“I should have done it years ago, but. Sometimes you need a reason, you know? Something from the outside.”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t know.” He deliberately doesn’t think of another bar, a year ago: Eddie sitting there in his suit and his messy hair and his conference badge with his wedding ring missing. He shrugs. “Take your word for it, though.”

On the other side of the room, Stan pauses to touch Mike’s arm and say something in a quiet voice before he slips out of the doorway toward the stairs and, presumably, his room. Bill and Ben are by the door, talking intently. Eddie—

Eddie is watching him with very nearly that same expression from the restaurant. It’s worse now that Richie knows the reason for it.

“Okay, I’m going to bed,” Bev says, sliding out of her chair.

“You want to take the whiskey bottle?”

“Tempting,” she says, dry and fond. “But no. That’s all you.”

“Thanks,” Richie mutters, but he manages a smile when she loops her arm around him in a quick tight hug. She pauses at the door, confers briefly with Bill, and makes her way up the stairs. Ben follows after her, and Bill and Mike drift into the lobby a few minutes later.

Eddie still hasn’t moved. He’s leaned up against the wall with his arms folded, and while he’s finally stopped staring at Richie, the eye-contact avoidance feels somehow even more pointed. Richie drops his gaze to the bartop, the layers of water stains under varnish that’s gone crackled and orange with age. It’s not long before footsteps approach; the stool that Bev was sitting on slides out and Eddie settles onto it.

“Hey,” he says.

“Fuck,” Richie says flatly, and reaches for the whiskey. “You want some?”

“No, I… no. Thank you.”

“More for me.” He pours himself a shot. This’ll be his sixth of the night, and he should probably lay off sometime soon if he doesn’t want to be dealing with the mother of all hangovers on top of everything else tomorrow. On the other hand, the idea of being sober right now is even worse.

There’s a sick feeling still buried at the pit of his stomach, something that’s half-fear, half-humiliation. Irrational. He knows it’s irrational to freak out over Eddie knowing about him. Eddie kissed him first, got hard for him, was obviously into it. They’re both equally fucking implicated here.

_But he didn’t know it was you, did he? He thought you were some stranger that he’d never have to see again, and now here you are with your big mouth and your stupid jokes and your pathetic decades-old crush, making things messy._

“How’s Bev?” Eddie asks finally, which wasn’t what Richie was expecting at all.

“Freaked the fuck out, same as any of us,” he says.

“Yeah.”

“She’s leaving her husband, apparently.”

“Good riddance,” Eddie says, with a fierceness that means he noticed the bruises too.

“Yeah.” Richie rattles his fingertips on the bartop. He shouldn’t ask, he knows. The last thing he wants to do is actually _talk_ about any of this. He spins the glass with his fingertips, leaving a wet circle of spilled whiskey behind on the bartop.

Eddie’s hands are resting on his thighs, lightly tanned, neatly manicured. There’s no ring there, no white strip of skin to indicate that one has recently been removed.

Richie’s brain-to-mouth filter abruptly gives out. “So what about you?”

“What?”

“You’re not wearing a ring,” Richie points out. The echo of his own words on his tongue tastes bitter, and it’s worse when Eddie’s expression twitches like he remembers too. “No more Mrs. K.?”

“Uh, no. The divorce was finalized three months ago. I moved out when I got back to New York after—” he breaks off, a flush rising to his cheeks. “After I met you.”

“Huh,” Richie says, and spins the shot glass again. There’s a reckless urge rising in him to just fucking break something. It’s this place, partly. Being back here is bringing all the worst parts of him to the surface like old graves after a hard rain, sinkholes full of rot and buried bones. Most of it, though, is just Richie being the self-sabotaging asshole he’s always been. “I wouldn’t have called that one.”

“You…” Eddie trails off, then drops his voice like he’s afraid someone’s going to overhear them. It makes Richie’s stomach twist, even though that’s the last thing he wants either. “You thought I’d just go back to my wife after—after—”

“After you fucked some random dude you met in a hotel bar?” Richie finishes for him. “Statistically, I mean, yeah.”

“You weren’t just some random dude,” Eddie hisses.

“Yeah, well, you didn’t know that at the time, did you?” Richie tilts his head, smiles through the nausea. “Look, man, it’s cool. You weren’t the first married guy I hooked up with, and you wouldn't be the last.”

“Did you…” Eddie trails off, then clears his throat. “Do you do that often? With guys, I mean?”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Richie says, stung. He tosses back his shot and sets the glass down hard on the bartop. “What, do you want my STD test results? Negatives across the board, although I’m sure you got tested the minute you got back to New York, so you already know that.”

Eddie’s mouth tightens in a way that means Richie was right on the money. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Yeah,” Richie says. Eddie is still watching him. “Yeah, yes, that’s your answer. Yes, I do that often, with guys. I’m _gay_ , genius, what the fuck do you think?”

“I mean,” Eddie says. “So am I.”

There it is. “Yeah, well, you spent six years married to a woman, not all of us have your powers of self-delusion.”

“Fuck you, man.”

“Little late for that,” Richie retorts, and feels a sort of sick satisfaction when Eddie flinches. The memory of Eddie in his hotel room surfaces in his mind: Eddie, naked and braced above him, moving sweet and slow and staring down at him with that soft, stunned, wondering expression—

He pours himself another shot. Eddie lets out a hard breath, then shoves his stool out and stands abruptly. “I’m going to bed,” he says. “You should, too.”

“Gonna tuck me in?” Richie asks him snidely, and downs the shot. “Kiss me goodnight?”

Eddie’s mouth twists like he wants to say something savage and devastating, and Richie grins hard, bracing for it. Instead he just shakes his head sharply, turns on his heel, and stalks out of the room. Richie listens to his footsteps pounding up the stairs, then puts his head down on the faintly tacky surface of the bar and tries to breathe.

* * *

He wakes up the next morning dry-mouthed with a pounding headache that doesn’t recede until he washes down a couple of Advil with several cups of truly vile coffee from the continental breakfast. Eddie is already there by the time he gets downstairs, his hair damp and his face drawn into hard frowning angles as he picks through the sad offering of wrapped pastries, inspecting the labels like he expects to find arsenic on the ingredient lists. He glances up when Richie comes in, then back down just as fast, snatching up a muffin seemingly at random before retreating to the far side of the room.

If Richie were less of an asshole, or at least less of a coward, he’d go apologize. Instead, he focuses on stirring way too much sugar into his coffee, the pit of his stomach writhing like a ball of snakes.

Ben and Bev come downstairs together. Bill is next, and then Stan, who is talking quietly into his phone as he pours himself coffee one-handed.

“—promise, babylove,” he says, tucking the phone under his ear to stir in cream and sugar. His voice is soft, fond, _intimate_. “Really. I know. I’ll call you tonight. Mmhm, love you too. Bye.”

He tucks the phone into his pocket, glancing Richie’s way, and Richie drops his head, focusing on the stale bearclaw that he’s more dissecting than eating. Even the coffee was probably a bad idea, although he needs the caffeine; if he actually tries to put solid food into his stomach right now the odds are good he’ll just puke it right back up.

“Hey, Rich,” Stan says, dropping into the chair opposite him.

“Morning,” Richie says back. “So, what’s the plan? Are we meeting Mike at the library, or—?”

“I’m not sure,” Stan starts, then breaks off as Eddie approaches.

“Mike just texted,” he says, shifting his feet, very clearly addressing Stan and only Stan. He doesn’t so much as glance at Richie. “He said to meet him down by the old clubhouse as soon as everybody’s ready to go.”

“He texted you?” Stan asks.

“He texted all of us, I think. I was just looking at my phone.” Eddie clears his throat, then says, “I’m going to get my jacket. Meet you outside.”

Richie takes a long, burning-hot swig of his coffee as Eddie retreats up the stairs, and looks up to see Stan watching him. “What?”

“Nothing.” Stan rubs his wrist, which is freshly bandaged. Richie tries not to stare, but he’s not sure he’s managing it. He keeps bouncing off of what Bev said last night. _I saw you in the bathtub, you had a razor._ Can’t stop imagining Stan trying to dig a blade into his own flesh. He couldn’t have gotten too far, not if he’s here at all instead of struck in a hospital room under 24-hour monitoring, which is an experience that Richie has some unfortunate personal familiarity with.

Cocaine, not razors. Although the end result is pretty similar.

“Am I allowed to make a tasteless joke?” he asks.

“Depends,” Stan says. “Is the other option your shitty ham-handed attempt at sympathy?”

“Yeah, you got me,” Richie says, and leans over to loop Stan into an awkward sideways hug. Stan grumbles under his breath and leans back into him _._ “Glad you made it, Stanley.”

“Yeah, yeah, fuck off,” Stan says into his shoulder. He’s shaking like he’s dying of cold, but his grip on Richie’s bicep is warm and solid. “Finish your coffee, let’s just go deal with this bullshit.”

* * *

They head out as a group into the cool gray Maine dawn. Bill takes the lead automatically, or maybe they all fall into step behind him automatically as they head down Jackson Street toward Up Mile Hill. Ben and Bev are walking together, not holding hands but so clearly oriented toward each other that they might as well be. Eddie stays on the other side of them, as far away from Richie as he can be and still stick with the group. Richie tries not to notice, but he’s really not being subtle about it at all.

Stan keeps glancing over at him, but he waits until after they clamber over the guardrail that separates the Barrens from the town like the awkward middle-aged fucks they all are. They all spread out in a line to make their way down the hill, under the train tracks, and he falls into step with Richie, letting the rest of them pull ahead.

“So,” he says.

“So… what?” Richie asks warily.

“What’s going on with you and Eddie, anyway?”

Richie shoves his hands in his pockets, avoiding Stan’s eyes. “What do you mean?”

“You guys seem… I don’t know. Tense.”

“We’re on our way to fight a shapeshifting demon clown that eats people, Stanley. Everybody’s fucking tense.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Stan says. He looks worryingly thoughtful when Richie risks a glance his way, but he doesn’t say anything else.

The woods are green and overgrown; the ground is swampy underfoot and the air is full of the vaguely putrid odor of layers upon layers of vegetation rotting in the damp. It’s too cold for insects, but Richie keeps imagining the low drone of them anyway. High summer sounds. It was August the first time they were here and some quality of that seems to linger. There are crumbling concrete cylinders jutting out of the earth here and there, their heavy caps green and slimy with moss. Morlock holes, he remembers Ben calling them: mouths leading into the sewers underneath Derry. Richie steps around one and shudders without quite knowing that he’s doing it.

Eddie takes the lead from Bill once they’re down among the trees without any discussion, and he remembers that, too: Eddie, their navigator, who could always find the way to go. Down through the tunnels, into the dark, and then back out again.

Mike is already at the clubhouse when they get there, hauling at the door that’s buried under twenty-some years of sod. Bill and Ben go to lend a hand; Eddie hangs back, glances toward Richie, then says, “If we’re really going to do this shit, we’ll need some firewood.”

“Green wood,” Mike says, slightly out of breath, and indicates the backpack slung over his shoulder with his free hand. “I have everything else we need here, but it’ll have to be green to smoke like we want it to.”

Eddie indicates the riotous spring forest around them, all damp and growing. There’s a faint edge of humor on his face. “Shouldn’t be a problem.”

“Is it really smart to split up?” Richie hears himself ask.

Eddie glances at him, then away. “I’m not going that far.”

“I’ll go with you,” Stan offers before Richie can make himself do it, and then the door comes loose in a sudden creak of rotten wood splintering, a spray of wet sod, sending Ben tumbling down into the darkness beneath with a startled yelp.

“I’m okay,” he calls a moment later. And then, “Jesus, it stinks down here.”

“Oh, shit, I’m sorry, that’s on me,” Richie says, trailing behind Bev as she starts down the ladder. “I was stashing some of Eddie’s mom’s underwear down there—”

“Fuck you, dude,” Eddie says, but it’s milder than he has been all morning. Peace offering accepted, maybe. “I’m getting firewood. Stan, you coming?”

“Yeah,” Stan says, with another dry and judgemental glance toward Richie. He doesn’t say anything else as they head out into the woods, and Richie follows Mike down the creaking ladder into the clubhouse.

It really does fucking reek, a damp swampy rotting odor that makes him think of an open grave. The posters on the wall are blackened with mildew, as is the hammock that’s dangling by a few rotted strands at the far end of the clubhouse. Richie skirts around it, hands shoved in his pockets. Those memories are mostly pretty innocent: comic books and bickering with Eddie’s lanky adolescent limbs tangled up with his, a sweet ache always sharpened with panic. It’s just hard to separate it now from the distinctly less innocent memory of Eddie in his hotel room last year.

“Oh, wow,” Bev says softly behind him. When he turns, she’s holding Bill’s old Wrist Rocket. The yellow bands are faded with age, the black rubber grip cracked. “Do you guys remember this? Ben, you remember we melted down those coins?”

“To shoot the werewolf, yeah,” Ben says, and Richie makes a face, drifting back into the shadows. Another memory slots into place like it’s always been there: the werewolf with the torn jacket reading _TOZIER_ across the back. Bev standing fierce in the grimy darkness of the Neibolt house, slingshot in hand, coolly taking aim as it started to charge.

She holds it out to Bill, who shakes his head, smiling. “Th-that’s all you.”

“I doubt it still works,” Bev says, but she tucks it into her back pocket all the same.

“We should clear out the center, I think,” Mike says, shrugging his backpack off and surveying the space. “Right here, where it’s just dirt. If we can get all the dry stuff out of the way we should be able to get a fire going without burning the whole place down.”

“Yeah, let me help you,” Ben says, like the boyscout he is. Richie hangs back in the dark corner behind the hammock while the rest of them shove all of the dry grass and leaves and random detritus out of the middle of the floor. Eddie and Stan return ten minutes later to haul down armloads of green branches dripping sap, new leaves still clinging to them. They drop them in the clear spot and Stan goes back up the ladder, but Eddie pauses, regarding the hammock. His face is hard to read. Richie wonders what he’s thinking, then decides he’s better off not knowing.

He sinks back into the shadows as Mike starts pulling shit out of his backpack, calls up the nightmarish echo of Pennywise that’s been living undisturbed at the back of his head for decades, and gives it voice.

“Hey Losers. Time to _FLOAT!_ ”

* * *

After everybody’s done yelling at him, they pull the rotting door over the entrance to the clubhouse. There are a few chunks of wood missing and the hazy morning light still filters in, but it should be enough to trap the smoke. Eddie and Stan make a pyre of their green wood, and Mike adds a handful of dried herbs from a ziplock bag in his backpack.

“Are we even going to be able to get this to light?” Richie asks, then pauses when Mike brings out a blowtorch. “O-o-okay. I guess so.”

“I have some firestarters too,” Mike says absently, fiddling with the torch until it produces an intense blue-orange flame. “But I think this’ll work.”

It works well enough, anyway. Within a few minutes, clouds of gray smoke billow up, leaves flaring up and sending burning scraps up into the air as the green wood starts to catch. The heavy acrid odor is cut through with an incongruous sweetness that must be the herbs Mike tossed on.

“Fuck,” Richie coughs. Smoke burns sharply in his lungs and throat. “I forgot how fucking awful this part is.”

“Just hang on, if you can,” Mike says, rough and rasping already. “I think it’ll be better if we all—”

Stan starts to rise. “Guys, I can’t—”

“Come on, Stan,” Bev says, but Eddie is the one who catches his wrist before he can stand. His eyes are already streaming, and he doesn’t speak.

“Y-you can do it,” Bill says firmly, and Stan sinks reluctantly back down as Ben rasps, “Something’s happening—”

For a moment, Richie doesn’t know what he means. There’s just billowing smoke, burning his eyes and obscuring the clubhouse, the rest of their faces. He reaches out, fumbling blindly, and feels Bill’s hand slip into his. A moment later, Eddie grasps his other hand, squeezing painfully tight. Richie squeezes back, then sways, disoriented.

“The fuck did you give us, Mikey?” he slurs. The inside of his skull seems to be expanding like a balloon, his thoughts separating into that dim empty space.

The clubhouse is expanding too. Swirling gray smoke gives way to a cavernous darkness. Bill and Eddie’s fingers start to slip away from him, and he grabs for them, suddenly frantic. Sweat-slippery and clinging. Vertigo spins him like a Tilt-a-Whirl, like if he doesn’t hold on he could be flung out into the outer reaches of that darkness, never to return. It’s an insane fear, logically, but one that seems suddenly entirely too plausible.

Someone shouts _“Hold on!”_ but he can’t tell who it is, and then there’s—silence. The darkness presses in. The burn of smoke in his lungs fades, replaced by a strange heaviness, like he’s been breathing water. He can’t feel Eddie or Bill’s hands. He can’t feel _anything._

Then a titanic shape drifts past him, so vast it’s rendered incomprehensible. Like a living galaxy in the shape of what looks—well, what looks like a fucking turtle, of all things. One enormous eye turns toward him, and the voice that speaks could crumble stone, could vibrate him to pieces.

 _OH_ , it says. _YOU AGAIN._

“What the fuck,” Richie says, or means to say. He’s not sure he has a mouth to say it with. “Again?”

_HMM. WE HAVE MET BEFORE._

“I’m pretty sure I’d remember that,” Richie says, or thinks he says. “All I remember is the fucking sky opening up to let that thing through. The clown. Alien. Whatever.”

_IT. THE EATER OF WORLDS._

“That’s fucking reassuring.”

_IT WAS NOT MEANT TO BE._

“Well, maybe you could show us something fucking useful this time. You’re on our side, right?”

He thinks so. He _hopes_ so, given that he’s mouthing off to what he suspects might actually be a god, or something like it. Too late now. He’s pretty sure he’s not dead, so that’s something. He wonders if the others are having their own versions of this conversation; he can’t see or hear or sense them in any way. He doesn’t remember letting go of Eddie or Bill, but he’s not sure he has hands to hold onto them right now.

 _I AM,_ it says. _IT IS… DIFFICULT TO SAY WHAT WOULD BE USEFUL FOR YOU. HMM._

There’s a sense of ponderous thought, and then the blackness around him shifts, lightening, taking on shape. A high overpass that curves sharply several hundred feet over a river. A black Escalade speeds past, and Richie shouldn’t be able to make out the face of the driver, but somehow he can all the same: Eddie’s face, tense and clenched and strangely blank. His hands jerk on the wheel, sending the SUV careening through the guardrail at seventy miles an hour to tumble into the inky water beneath.

Richie jolts forward, but the scene has already changed. Now it’s Bill, sitting behind a desk in a sunny room. Palm trees sway outside the window. He slips his reading glasses off, closes his laptop, and reaches for something in his lap. His eerily blank expression is a mirror of Eddie’s as he brings a handgun up and sets the muzzle to his temple.

Colors bleed and fade, and he’s in a clean white bathroom and a full bathtub with the water going pink as Stan carves deep bloody furrows into his wrists.

In a gorgeous, empty house, Ben sprawls like a broken mannequin on a plush rug with a bottle of whiskey spilling its dregs across the floor. The room twists and reforms: Bev is on a rooftop, red hair flying in the wind, eyes wide-open and unseeing as she steps off the edge into thin air.

The Derry public library looms ahead in the darkness. Mike pulls the door shut and locks it, careful and methodical before he pockets the keys and crosses the street directly into the path of an oncoming truck.

“What the fuck, what the _fuck_ ,” Richie gasps. It’s dark again. He feels like he has a body now, and that body is kneeling on something hard. Something cold. “What the fuck, how the hell is this supposed to help?”

 _IT MUST BE FINISHED_ , the voice echoes. _OR—_

“Fuck you,” Richie rasps, and opens his eyes.

He’s in his L.A. house, which always feels bigger and emptier than it really is. Designer furniture scattered with empty takeout boxes. He’s sitting on the kitchen floor, watching himself. Himself a decade from now, maybe—grayer and balder, his skin loosening into deep bags under his eyes. He has a bottle of pills in his hand and is methodically swallowing them one after another after another. His face is masklike, as expressionless as if he’s already dead.

“I won’t—that’s not going to happen,” he says, and then the floor vanishes out from beneath him and he's floating, he's floating in some hot orange-lit space like the inside of the sun and there's something terrible in there with him, something terrible and ancient and hungry that sinks its teeth into him and doesn't let go.

 _It's eternity in there_ , something whispers to him in a voice that might be Bev's, or Stan's, or maybe the clown's. _It's eternity in there and all you can do is watch—_

The light fades and he falls into darkness.

He lands on dirt this time. The smoke is hot and strangling, and he can feel Bill and Eddie on either side, their hands squeezed so tightly in his that his fingers are starting to cramp. Someone coughs.

“I’m getting the fuck out of here, I’m out of here, I fucking can’t—” Stan says somewhere nearby, and he’s either coughing or crying or both. Richie is pretty sure _he’s_ doing both. He hauls at Bill and Eddie, and someone—probably Ben, who was closest—gets the hatch-door open. A moment later they’re all climbing up the ladder, fumbling and clumsy and crashing into each other as they spill out into the sunlit green Barrens. Richie lands hard on his knees and doesn’t get up right away.

The earth is soggy beneath him, bleeding dampness through his clothes, but he can’t care about that right now. He’s coughing so hard that he can barely suck a breath in between, his eyes streaming. His insides feel like they’ve been scraped raw and flambéed for good measure.

“Did—” Bill says, and then breaks off coughing. “Under Neibolt, there was a fire, we made a fire and we all threw something in—w-what did you guys see?”

“We summoned it,” Bev says slowly. “Pennywise. We summoned it, and we killed it.”

Ben is nodding like he knows what the fuck she's talking about. Mike lets out a soft, surprised sound. “The ritual. I didn't think it would work.”

Stan is gray-faced, coughing into his hands, but when Bill glances at him he shakes his head. “I didn't see anything like that. It was just—”

“A fucking nightmare,” Eddie mutters, and it’s only then that Richie realizes they’re still holding hands. Bill has pulled away, heaving himself upright, but Eddie is still holding on. Richie glances over at him. Their eyes meet. Eddie’s fingers twitch, and then he pulls away, cradling his hand against his chest like it hurts. His eyes are wet, but it’s probably from the smoke.

Richie curls his fingers against the lingering warmth and staggers to his feet as Mike rasps, “If we're going to do this, we need to remember. All of us, we need to remember.”


	3. The freedom of falling

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNINGS FOR THIS CHAPTER: Canon-typical violence, explicit smut.

In the unlikely event that Richie survives this shit, he’s never setting foot in Derry again.

He stalks away from Bassey Park with his shoulders hunched, the clown’s laughter and Bowers’ mocking shouts still ringing in his ears. The arcade token is a hard-edged lump in his fist. He keeps having to stomp down on the impulse to turn and see if something is following him: Pennywise with his wide bloody grin, or the werewolf with Richie’s name on its jacket. The monsters in his closet have always been entirely too real, but he’s not touching that metaphor with a ten-foot pole.

In the parking lot at the Town House, he pauses by his car and seriously considers hopping behind the wheel and just fucking flooring it until he hits the county line. Fuck this place, fuck Mike’s ritual, fuck all of it. He’s got tour dates in Reno, a life in L.A.. He doesn’t owe this town shit.

He’s got an empty house and a bottle of sleeping pills waiting for him, and the rest of them don’t end up any better.

Richie trails his fingers over the hood of the Mustang and remembers Eddie rolling his eyes and mocking his taste in cars. Eddie behind the wheel of his Escalade, eyes blank as it tumbled toward the river.

“Fuck it,” he mutters, and heads inside.

Ben and Bev are on the stairs, but he stomps by them without a word. In his room, he sits on the bed and turns the token over and over in his hand, watching the light reflect off of it, trying very hard not to think about anything at all.

More footsteps. Eddie passes his room, grumbling in a tone that sounds outraged, though he can’t make out the words. Richie flops back on his bed with a groan just as a loud crash echoes down the hall. That’s enough to jerk his head up, but what gets him on his feet and out the door before he can even remember moving is the sound of Eddie’s panicked yelling.

The door to Eddie’s room hangs open; in the bathroom, Eddie is struggling with a large man who has him slammed up against the wall. There’s a flash of metal; blood splatters across the tile and the torn shower curtain, and Richie crosses the room in two long strides to tear the guy away without even thinking about the knife. Red-hot pain slides across the back of his wrist and skitters up his arm. He yanks back with a yelp, then just barely manages to catch the guy’s knife-hand before he gets gutted.

“Richie, don’t—” Eddie yells, and the guy grins at him, watery blue eyes hot with vicious glee.

Richie remembers him. Of fucking course he does, after coming face-to-face with his younger ghost at the arcade half an hour ago.

“Oh, it’s _Tozier,_ ” Henry Bowers says, grinning with jagged yellowing teeth that look like they should belong to a horror movie monster. Or the fucking clown, like there’s a bit of Pennywise in him right now, sharp and hungry. “You sure came running fast for your little boyfriend here, didn’t you?”

He strains against Richie’s grip, then kicks him hard in the knee. As Richie falls he sees the knife coming down and has a moment to think, _Oh, shit, looks like I won’t get to die in the sewers after all—_

There’s a sudden hard crash, and Bowers collapses like a sack of meat, half on top of him. The knife clatters out of his hand. Richie struggles away and only then realizes that Eddie is standing over them, wide-eyed and bloody with a broken glass bottle in his upraised fist.

“My hero,” Richie manages as footsteps clatter up the stairs accompanied by a jumble of worried voices, but it comes out too ragged and uneven to be a joke. Blood is spreading through the mess of shattered glass beneath Bowers’ head and his eyes are at half-mast, utterly blank. He’s obviously dead.

Richie just barely manages to stagger to the toilet before his stomach rebels.

* * *

The three-ring circus of cop cars and ambulances and the coroner's van is fully underway by the time Stan gets back. Richie looks up from the third round of tedious, repetitive questioning that he’s trying to answer without saying something that’ll get him arrested, and there’s Stan, standing frozen in the lobby with a battered elderly copy of _The_ _Peterson Field Guide to Eastern Birds_ clutched in one hand. It looks like the same one he used to carry everywhere all through middle and high school; it probably is the same exact book. The old scars circling his jaw are raw and livid.

“Mr. Tozier?” prompts the exasperated cop, and Richie blinks back at her.

“Uh, sorry,” he says, as Bev goes over to Stan and lays a gentle hand on his arm. She and Ben, at least, are done being interrogated. Eddie is outside, sitting in the rear of the ambulance and scowling while an EMT bandages his cheek. Richie can see him from here. Richie is having some trouble taking his eyes off of him, actually, even with a uniformed and irritable police officer standing over him. “What was the question again?”

“Do you know of any reason that Henry Bowers would attack you or Mr. Kaspbrak?”

“I mean technically he was attacking Eddie, I just interrupted.” Richie sees her mouth start to tighten. He raps his knuckles on his thighs, trying not to fidget suspiciously, but if he has to sit here much longer he’s going to climb out of his skin. “I don’t know. Like I told you. He broke Eddie’s arm once when we were in middle school, but I haven’t seen him since then, so…” He trails off, shrugs tightly. He’s having some trouble taking any of this as seriously as he probably should. There’s just something faintly absurd about the mundanity of all of this when they’re preparing to fight an interdimensional demon.

And ending up in a holding cell for the night will put a serious damper on that, and probably end up with him and Eddie both getting eaten, so he needs to keep a lid on his temper.

“You haven’t had any contact with him recently?”

“No,” Richie says. “He used to kick my ass when we were kids, we weren’t exactly fuckin’ pen-pals.” He makes a face. “Sorry. But, like, I haven’t been back to Maine in twenty years. I can’t really tell you anything. Sorry.”

The next twenty minutes are more of the same. The coroners come downstairs with a stretcher. A lumpy body bag conceals what’s left of Bowers, but Richie still has to look away before he gags. Eddie comes back in, his face bandaged, and takes over answering questions with a stiffness that Richie suspects is only partly because of the hole in his cheek. His leg jiggles impatiently, but otherwise he does a much better job of concealing his temper than Richie has been.

Eventually, it’s over. Well, not _over_ —he and Eddie both have strict instructions not to leave the state until further notice, but they’re also not under arrest, which means that the Derry Police Department is planning on handling this with all its usual professionalism and competence. The ambulances pull out of the parking lot; the coroner’s van is already long-gone. The cops take their notes and their scowls and get back in their cars. Richie stands on the steps with his hands tucked in his pockets, the tape on his bandaged arm pulling uncomfortably at his skin, and watches them go. The sun is sinking past the horizon, drawing long bloody fingers of light across the pavement.

Bill and Mike still aren’t back.

Eddie comes up alongside him. “Bev just called Bill and left a message. If he doesn’t call back in ten minutes we’re going to go out looking for him.”

“What about Mike?”

“Still at the library. He’s okay. Last I heard.”

Unspoken is the fact that that could change in a hurry. Richie hunches his shoulders under his jacket. The waiting is almost worse than the fighting. _Almost_. “Are _you_ okay?”

“My face hurts. It’s fine. I’ll go to the walk-in and get stitches after…” he trails off. “All this. We’ll be fine.”

He sounds like he’s trying to reassure himself.

“Sure we will,” Richie says, although he doesn’t believe it and he knows Eddie doesn’t either. “Anyway, facial scars are hot. You’ll look like a Wall Street pirate.”

“Fuck you, man,” Eddie says, but he’s smiling a little.

Richie takes a breath, then lets it out, staring out across the parking lot instead of looking at Eddie. “So, hey. I just wanted to say—I’m sorry for being such an asshole about everything last night.”

Eddie glances over at him. “Are you just apologizing right now because you think we’re gonna die? Because that doesn’t exactly make me feel better.”

“No,” Richie says. “Well, yeah. Maybe. I am sorry, though.”

“Fine,” Eddie says. It’s snippy, but not in a particularly mean way. More in the way that Eddie always was as a kid—sharp, like everything about him had been honed to a razor edge. He was like that when Richie met him in Chicago last year, too. In some ways he really hasn’t changed at all. “Apology accepted. Can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” Richie says warily.

“Back in Chicago, would you have asked me back to your room if you remembered who I was?”

“Fuck no.” Richie winces the moment the words are out of his mouth. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“It’s fine,” Eddie says stiffly. “Forget I asked.”

“Eds.” The nickname seems weighted on his tongue. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“How the fuck did you mean it, then?”

Richie rolls his jaw. Stares out into the deepening dusk. Finally he says, “You know, I had a thing for you when we were kids.”

“No,” Eddie says eventually. His voice is hard to read. “I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah. Fuckin’—I used to dream about taking you to fucking prom or something. Kissing you in the back row of the Aladdin, all that shit. And now—” He breaks off. Words are his thing, but he doesn’t know how to articulate this. Or maybe he does, and he’s just afraid to say it. _I was so in love with you back then, and I think it would be easy to fall in love with you again, and that scares the hell out of me._

“I don’t know, man,” he says instead. “I never would have had the balls to ask if I knew it was you.”

The silence stretches out, but it’s thoughtful this time. Finally, Eddie says, “That wasn’t the first time I tried to leave Myra.”

Richie opens his mouth, then shuts it again.

Eddie sighs, dragging a hand over his face and then wincing like he forgot about the stab wound in his cheek. “Things were never really good between us. She was… controlling, and most of the time I’d just knuckle under, and the rest of the time it would turn into a big fight, but—you know, I’d go get a hotel room for a couple of days, and then I’d always come home sooner or later. I guess I couldn’t imagine anything different.”

“Oh,” Richie murmurs. The back of his throat feels tight.

“And then I met you, and—I couldn’t even remember your name by the time I got on the plane, but it still felt more real than my whole marriage. I couldn’t go back after that.”

There’s a part of Richie—the cowardly, panicky part of him that’s been steering since he got back to Derry—that wants to make some snide, shitty joke and send this careening back toward the safer grounds of angry bickering. He swallows it back with an effort and says, “I didn’t even think to look for your phone number when I woke up.”

“Would you have called?”

“Yeah,” Richie says. Even admitting that much feels like digging his beating heart out of his chest and offering it for Eddie to stomp on. But fair’s fair, and it’s the truth. “Yeah, I would have. I wish I had.”

“Yeah,” Eddie says, raw, and then there are footsteps behind them before either of them can say anything else.

Richie is both relieved and not to see Ben coming down the hallway. He looks grim but not panicked, so hopefully everybody else is okay.

God, let them all be okay.

“Mike just called,” he says. “Bill is on his way over to Neibolt. Alone.”

“Fuck,” Richie says, and oh, _there’s_ the panic he was waiting on. “Okay, then. I guess it’s showtime.”

* * *

They catch up to Bill before he can go get himself killed on his own, but after that everything goes pretty quickly to shit. Eddie leads them down into the tunnels, where the flooded cistern gives way to jagged rock walls still exploding upward from the long-ago meteor strike. There’s an awful stench that Richie doesn’t think is coming from the graywater drenching all of their clothes. It’s like rotting meat, burnt flesh, the werewolf’s hot breath on his face.

 _It’s here_ , he thinks. _Even if we can’t see it yet, it’s here, it’s waiting for us._

It’s not the werewolf he thinks of, but a spider lurking in the shadows, waiting for the tasty little bugs to get fully ensnared in its web before it strikes. He’s got a bad fucking feeling that they’re the bugs in this scenario.

Too late to back out now, though.

Eddie sidles close enough to bump his shoulder while Mike sets up the ritual brazier that he was apparently hauling around in his backpack. He looks slightly calmer than he did up in the house, although Richie’s not sure if it’s from his pep talk or from the fence post that Bev handed off to him, which he still has clutched in a white-knuckled grip.

“Hey. You okay?”

“Yep,” Richie says tightly. “I love this shit. I go spelunking in sewers for fun all the fucking time.”

“Guys,” Bill says quietly before Eddie can get out the retort he’s clearly formulating. Mike has got the fire going, unnaturally hot inside the little brazier. “Come on. L-lets do this.”

They all toss their tokens into the fire: Bev’s poem, Ben’s yearbook page, Eddie’s plastic inhaler, which should stink like hell the minute it hits the flame but doesn’t. Stan drops in the bird book that he’s been clutching to his chest like a shield this whole time. Bill turns a folded paper boat over and over in his fingers before he lets it fall into the fire.

Richie drops his arcade token in. Mike drops in a big fucking rock that barely fits in the mouth of the container, and they all grab hands, chanting as the fire flares and darkness spins around them, and Richie has one single moment of uncharacteristic optimism that this actually _worked_ —

And then the clown is there, shrieking laughter and very much not fucking dead.

 _Bugs, meet spider_ , Richie thinks, and grabs at Eddie’s free hand as they flee. They lose the others in the tunnels pretty quickly, but he manages to keep hold of Eddie through the tunnels and the doors and the fucking demon dog, too frantic and terrified to be embarrassed about how he’s clinging, especially when Eddie is clinging back just as hard.

 _We’re going to die down here and I was such an asshole to you_ , he thinks. _We’re going to die down here and I should have kissed you last night when I had the chance—_

The tunnel twists back toward the cavern, the cratered rocks, the clown—vast and howling on way too many fucking legs—looming over Mike. Richie lets go of Eddie’s hand and stoops to pick up a fist-sized rock from the tunnel floor. He’s not thinking at all as he charges forward, yelling, flinging the rock like this is a fight with the Bowers gang and not an interdimensional monster.

It turns toward him. Everything stops. The world goes orange and hot and screaming.

_It’s eternity in there_.

_It’s eternity in here and everything floats and all you can do is—_

(Hey Rich wake up there he is buddy Richie I think I got it man—)

_—all you can do is—_

(I think I did it I think I killed it for real—)

_—watch—_

(Richie?)

_—all you can fucking do is watch his blood is on your face on your glasses in your mouth—_

(We did it man we killed it Eddie we—)

_—he says he made it small he said to make it small enough to crush and you did but it’s too late too late too late—_

(Guys we can still help him we can still save him he’s still down there Eddie _EDDIE—)_

He falls back into his body, gasping. Trying to, anyway: there’s something on top of him. Some _one_ on top of him, hands on his shoulders, a mouth pressed against his. It’s half of a kiss that ends as soon as he’s aware it’s happening.

Eddie pulls back. His eyes are wide, his smile giddy and relieved.

“There you are,” he says. “Richie, I think I got it, man, I think I—”

(— _killed it for real—_ )

Richie tackles him to the side almost before his brain processes the words. Eddie yelps out a startled _what the fuck!_ and shoves back, but Richie’s got a good forty pounds on him and he uses his weight to push Eddie back against the rocks, sheltering him with his body.

The claw comes down hard enough to shatter stone, less than a foot from their heads. Eddie stops trying to shove him off and stares at it, wide-eyed.

“Oh _fuck_ ,” he says.

“It’s not fucking dead,” Richie says, and hauls him upright as Pennywise rises cackling out of the crater on spider legs, swelling up like a nightmarish balloon again to fill the entire space. “Let’s _go_.”

It charges after them, but a moment later Bev is there, Wrist Rocket in hand, taking aim with the same deadly calm that she had in the Neibolt house all those years ago. One of the clown’s eyes vanishes in a splash of gore. It spins toward her, shrieking, but there’s Stan emerging from one of the upper tunnels, white-faced but steady as he fires off a baseball-sized rock like a fastball. Mike, who must have got to safety at some point when Richie was—

( _floating_ )

—caught in the Deadlights, emerges to throw another rock from the far side. Then Bill, then Ben, all of them coming from different directions, keeping the clown spinning and snapping uselessly at them until Richie manages to shove Eddie into one of the narrow, twisting tunnels at the base of the cavern. They stumble down the steep slope and duck behind a shelf of stone at the bottom, and it’s only then that Richie realizes that it’s the same spot where he saw Eddie land. Before. Where he saw Eddie choking on blood and still smiling because _he knew how to kill it._

“You’re a fucking genius,” Richie says out loud. All the rest of it—the blood and Eddie’s whistling breaths and the terrible silence that followed—he shoves that _way_ the fuck down to be dealt with hopefully never.

“I am?” Eddie asks. He’s got a look on his face like he’s concerned Richie is losing his mind, which is probably justified. “What?”

“I’ll explain later.”

The others are stumbling in now, bloody and bruised but alive, alive, _alive_.

“We have to get out of here,” Stan is saying, “we can’t, it’s not going to work—”

“—no, we need to _fight_ ,” Bev interrupts.

“If we can get out I can go back to the library, and see if—”

“I’m sticking with Bev, either way,” Ben says firmly.

“You guys,” Richie says, raising his voice to cut over them. “ _Guys!_ Hey, shut up for a second.”

Six dirty, grim faces turn toward him, but it’s Bill who says, “W-what is it, Richie?”

Richie takes a deep breath. “I saw something in the Deadlights.”

Eddie, dead and bloody with his body torn open. Richie, screaming in Ben and Mike’s arms outside of Neibolt. An empty seat and a sobbing phone call where Stan should have been. He shakes all that off.

“I saw something,” he says again. “I know how we can kill it.”

* * *

So they kill it, just like Eddie—

( _the other Eddie the one who died down here all alone in the darkness)_

—just like Eddie said they could.

They shout it down until it’s small and mewling and frantically begging and then they crush it’s fucking heart, and Richie watches the motes of light rising up with a satisfaction that borders on vicious.

A moment later, the whole place starts quaking, vast chunks of rocks coming down, and they scramble for the exit. Richie hangs onto Eddie’s hand all the way back up into the light, and he doesn’t let go until they’re at the far end of the street, watching the earth open up to swallow 29 Neibolt Street whole.

* * *

They go to the quarry, where Eddie refuses to get in the water and harangues the rest of them until they stop splashing each other and climb out, loose-limbed and exhausted and almost hysterically giddy. Mike drives those of them who are actively bleeding to the walk-in clinic on the far side of town.

Back at the Town House, Richie heads for the stairs, head down, exhaustion pulling at him like a lead weight. Eddie follows him down the hallway instead of going into his own room. Richie glances back at him as he unlocks the door. “What’s up, man?”

“Can I, uh.” Eddie shifts his weight. “Can I use your shower? My bathroom is trashed, and like. Probably still covered in blood.”

Bowers. Right. Somehow with everything else he almost managed to forget that. He glances at Eddie’s cheek, which is just about the only clean part of him right now, thanks to the handful of antiseptic wipes wielded by the baffled and visibly revolted nurse at the walk-in. Black bristles of half a dozen stitches hold the injury closed, but it still has to hurt like hell.

“Yeah, of course,” he says. “Come on in. Want first dibs?”

“Thanks,” Eddie says, uncharacteristically subdued, and follows him in. “You go ahead. I can wait.”

Richie pauses with his hand on the door frame. He feels—fucking disgusting, honestly, like he’s going to peel off his skin if he doesn’t get clean soon, but Eddie’s in the same condition, and also got stabbed on top of it.

He sighs. They just killed an alien monster and nearly got crushed in a collapsing cave immediately after. He watched Eddie die in a way that’ll be haunting his nightmares for the next forever, probably, and—

And Eddie kissed him back there. He is abruptly too fucking tired to freak out about any of this anymore.

“We can share, if you want,” he says.

Eddie blinks at him. “What?”

“Not like we haven’t already seen each other’s dicks,” Richie says, and heads into the bathroom, hauling his grimy shirt off as he goes.

He’s honestly not sure what he expects Eddie to do—squawking objections or storming out are both perfectly plausible options—but a moment later there’s a soft sigh behind him, a shift of clothing. He glances back to see Eddie pulling off his filthy, soaking-wet sneakers, folding his equally filthy socks on top of them just like he did with his nice leather oxfords in a hotel room in Chicago a year ago. He shrugs out of his jacket and drapes it over the back of the chair, and something twists, aching, in the back of Richie’s throat.

He drops his glasses on the sink, kicks his shoes off and gets the shower running, then struggles out of his jeans. The denim is dried so stiff it could probably stand up on its own, and he’s covered in bruises from his fifteen-foot fall onto a pile of pointy rocks. He prods at a massive purpling one on his upper thigh, winces, and shoves his boxers off to step into the shower. A moment later the curtain rustles as Eddie follows him in.

“Thanks,” Eddie murmurs, when Richie catches him by the shoulder and steers him under the spray. It’s probably just as well that he feels too exhausted and sore and gross to pop a boner right now, even in the presence of a soaking wet and stark naked Eddie Kaspbrak.

Who is also pretty fucking gross right now, honestly. Grime sluices out of Eddie’s hair as he ducks his head under the water, muddy rivulets cutting down his shoulders and back. He retrieves the shampoo bottle from the caddy and doesn’t even offer a token complaint about Richie’s no doubt subpar choice of personal grooming products.

Richie, for his part, leans back against the wall and closes his eyes, letting himself drift as warm water patters over his feet and legs.

“Your turn,” Eddie murmurs, and he realizes that he was perilously close to dozing off standing up in the shower. He blinks, trying to get his brain back online, as Eddie slips past him, shower gel in hand, and nudges him into the water. That’s enough to wake him up, at least a little. Deja vu slips cold fingers down his spine.

Palimpsest layers of another timeline: the details are scraped away but the imprint still remains underneath. In that one, he’s alone in the shower and it’s Eddie’s blood he’s rinsing off, and he’s sobbing too hard to watch the pink-tinged water swirl away down the drain. Richie holds his breath and ducks his face into the spray. Even though the water is turned up as hot as it’ll go, he’s shivering.

“Rich?” Eddie asks him quietly.

“Yeah,” Richie manages. He feels suddenly, mortifyingly, like he might cry. “Yeah. I’m good.”

Eddie doesn’t push it, surprisingly. Instead, he holds out the bottle of shower gel. “Here. I’m done.”

“Thanks,” Richie mumbles. He takes it, then catches Eddie’s arm with his other hand. Lightly, so that he could pull away if he wanted to. He doesn’t. He doesn’t pull away, and he doesn’t close his eyes as Richie leans down to kiss him carefully on the mouth.

He sighs when they break apart, and Richie squeezes his eyes shut.

“Sorry,” he says, and then, “was that okay?”

Eddie laughs quietly, and Richie finds himself grinning a little. The absurdity of the situation isn’t lost on him, but it’s worth it for the way Eddie touches his jaw carefully, then curls his hand around Richie’s nape to draw him down into another kiss. It’s still careful, because of Eddie’s fucked-up cheek, but there’s a promise of heat to it. And okay, yeah, maybe _now_ Richie’s dick is starting to get interested in the proceedings, but a quick glance down between them is enough to show that he’s not the only one in that boat, so that’s probably okay.

“Yeah, dumbass,” Eddie says when he pulls back, achingly tender. “Now finish getting cleaned up so we can go to bed.”

“ _We_ , huh?”

“Shut up,” Eddie says. He’s blushing now. “Is _that_ okay? I kind of assumed.”

“Yeah, it’s fucking okay,” Richie says incredulously, stepping back under the hot water. “Jesus, Eds.”

“Well, you’ve been sending out some mixed signals. I’m just saying.”

That’s fair, probably. He pauses rinsing his hair out to meet Eddie’s eyes. “For the sake of clarity, I really do want to go to bed with you.”

“Okay. Thank you for clarifying.”

Richie laughs, rubbing the shower gel between his palms to make a lather before he starts washing up. He’s really not trying to make a show of it, but when he opens his eyes again, Eddie is watching with a sort of hot, fascinated expression. He swallows hard. “You gotta stop looking at me like that, man, or we’re never going to make it out of the shower.”

“Would that be such a bad thing?” Eddie asks, and doesn’t stop looking at him like that. He looks like something conjured up directly out of the depths of Richie’s id, with his hair plastered to his head and his skin wet and gleaming. His cock is hard, flushed against his thigh, and Richie has to tear his eyes away before he goes to his knees right here on the hard tile.

“I’m too old and beat-up to fuck anybody in a shower right now,” he says, to his own libido as much as to Eddie.

Eddie laughs, sounding startled. “Okay, fine. Don’t take too long.”

He presses another quick kiss to Richie’s mouth, then slips out of the tub, pulling the curtain shut behind him.

The bathroom is empty by the time Richie gets out a few minutes later. He dries off quickly and wraps the towel around his hips as he makes his way back out into the bedroom, his nerves humming with a sort of exhilarated terror. There’s part of him, even now, that is sure that he must have misunderstood what Eddie meant. That he can’t possibly want—this. Richie, with all of his baggage, with all of this history between them.

The room is dim. The curtains are drawn against the morning, but the bedside lamp is on, suffusing the space in a dusty golden light. Eddie is sprawled out naked in his bed, his damp hair messy against the pillow, the smooth muscular lines of his body limned in gold.

“Holy shit,” Richie says seriously.

“I don’t have any clean clothes in here,” Eddie says, lifting his head. He looks both smug and oddly shy, like Richie’s not the only one who’s nervous about this.

“I am fully on board with you never wearing clothes again,” Richie says. Eddie cracks up, rolling over onto his back as Richie sits down on the edge of the bed.

“That’ll be fun to explain to everybody.”

“Oh no, in this scenario you’re staying in bed, like, permanently.”

“You really don’t know how to flirt without sounding like a serial killer, huh?”

“It’s a problem, yeah,” Richie agrees, leaning down to kiss him. Eddie props himself up on one elbow to kiss him back, and it’s pretty much perfect until Eddie tries to deepen the kiss and evidently remembers about his stitches.

He pulls back, wincing. “Shit, ow. Sorry.”

“You really don’t need to apologize for getting stabbed in the face, dude.”

“Please don’t bring that up while we’re making out.”

“Okay,” Richie says agreeably, and ducks his head to kiss down Eddie’s jaw, pausing over the pulse point in his throat to suck a mark there. Eddie jerks beneath him, swears under his breath; his hand comes up to grip firmly at Richie’s shoulder, fingers digging in.

"Are you giving me a hickey?" he breathes.

Richie pulls off, then kisses the mark he just made. "Yeah. Is that a problem?"

“A little late now if it was, huh?”

“Yep.” He does it again, feels Eddie shudder against him. “Doesn’t seem like it is, though.”

“You’re such an asshole,” Eddie says breathlessly, and Richie presses a smile to his skin.

“You kinda seem like you’re into that.”

“Yeah.” Eddie’s fingers slide through his damp hair. “I really am, actually.”

“Lucky me.” He kisses lower, pausing to press his mouth to the smooth, undamaged skin of Eddie’s chest, where in another world a monster’s claw tore through him. Eddie lets out a soft sigh, his fingers resting lightly on the back of Richie’s neck, and Richie keeps heading south before he can derail all this by fucking crying or something.

“Rich—oh, fuck,” Eddie murmurs, when Richie kisses down the inside of his thighs, ignoring his cock for the time being. It’s hard and leaking, and Richie has a sudden sense of deja vu for the last time they did this. Eddie sounds just the same, breathless and undone from barely anything. He’s so responsive, it drives Richie nuts. “You—you remember last time?”

He presses a grin to Eddie’s hip. “Yeah, vaguely.”

A huff of laughter; Eddie smacks his shoulder lightly. “Very fucking funny. You said you liked it both ways.”

_Oh._

Richie lifts his head enough to look up at Eddie, who is peering down at him with a dark, intent gaze. His lower lip is red like he’s been chewing on it, and he makes a swallowed little noise when Richie rubs a thumb over the head of his cock.

“Eddie,” he says roughly.

“I want you to fuck me,” Eddie says. “I mean. If you want to, if you have stuff—I don’t even know if—”

“I. Yeah.” Richie shakes his head. He feels kind of like he just got walloped upside the head with a hammer, like his brain is full of hearts and cartoon birds.

He does actually have lube and condoms in his bag, not because he had any expectation of getting laid when he came to Derry but because he spends half of his life on the road and never fully unpacks anyway. “Just—hang on a second.”

He rolls off of the bed, aware of Eddie’s eyes on him as he lets the towel drop in a heap on the end of the mattress and bends down to dig through his bag. He doesn’t meet Eddie’s eyes until he comes back up with lube and condoms clutched in his hand, and even though it’s not the first time he’s been naked in Eddie’s presence—isn’t the first time he’s been naked in Eddie’s presence in the past ten minutes, for that matter—he feels suddenly self-conscious.

“You want it?” he asks, and he means it to come out teasing, but the crack in his voice kind of ruins that.

“Jesus,” Eddie breathes. His eyes linger on Richie’s cock as he reaches down to stroke himself with slow, lingering touches. “Yeah, I want it.”

“Have you done this before?”

“No, I mean, you’re the only guy I’ve been with, so—”

Richie pauses. “Wait, really?”

“Yeah, really.” Eddie glares at him, but his hand is still working his cock, so he can’t be that upset. “I told you, I don’t just go home with people. Did you think I was fucking making that up?”

“Okay, okay,” Richie says, and leans down to kiss him, carefully this time. “Any preferences on position?”

“Yeah,” Eddie says, and rolls back over onto his stomach, his legs spread. When Richie takes a minute to stare at him, he lifts his head to look up. There’s something challenging in his face, because of fucking course there is. Of course Eddie would treat getting fucked for the first time as a challenge, with no concern for the fact that Richie’s brain is going to melt from how hot that is. “This okay?”

“Holy shit,” Richie says. “Yep. It’s okay.”

“Well, good.” Eddie puts his head back down and spreads his legs a little more, pushing his toes into the mattress. “Anytime now.”

“Jesus fucking Christ you’re so impatient,” Richie says, but he’s laughing now, laughing as he leans down to kiss Eddie’s shoulder before pouring lube into his palm. He rubs it between his fingers to warm it before sliding them down between Eddie’s legs and pressing in, just slightly. Eddie’s breath comes out explosively against the pillow. “Good?”

“Uh huh.” No more snark now, Richie notes with some degree of startled smugness; Eddie’s eyes are squeezed shut, his mouth open as Richie spreads slick into him, rubbing his thumb over the thin hot skin of his perineum before working another finger in. Eddie lets out a low groan. “Oh, fuck. Fuck, Richie, oh—”

“You really like that, huh?” Richie murmurs, and he can hear the awestruck tone in his own voice. He’s turned on, but it seems kind of distant right now, as focused as he is on watching Eddie come apart under his hands.

“Yeah,” Eddie breaths. “Yeah—fuck, please, I’m ready, I’m gonna—”

“Okay, I got you,” Richie murmurs, sliding his fingers out. He smooths his clean hand over the curve of Eddie’s ass and reaches for the condom. Eddie tucks his face into the pillow, breathing hard and clenching his fists like he’s trying not to move while Richie slicks himself up with trembling fingers. “Here, just—”

Eddie moves easily under his hands, hitching his knees up so that Richie can settle between his legs. He breathes out sharply when Richie’s cock breaches him, then in, then holds it, his body trembling, tight as a vice.

“Breathe, Eds,” Richie murmurs. He’s shaking too, trying so fucking hard to go slow. He reaches for one of Eddie’s clenched hands, kneading gently at his palm and trying to get him to relax as he sinks the rest of the way down.

“Oh,” Eddie breathes against the pillow. His fingers curl in Richie’s, and he rocks back against him tentatively, then gasps. “Oh fuck.”

“Good?”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s good, it’s—” he breaks off again as Richie starts to move. Slow at first, trying to give him time to adjust to it, but Eddie keeps grabbing at him, rocking against him, pushing him to speed up. Pushy, he’s so fucking pushy about this, which Richie always kind of thought he would be, when he let himself think about it at all.

He’s _loud_ , too, which Richie will probably worry about later. For now, he’s losing his mind listening to Eddie’s escalating moans and gasps. The only problem with this position is that he can barely see Eddie’s face, but he keeps scattering kisses over Eddie’s shoulders and the back of his neck, worrying the hot skin there between his teeth while Eddie curses into the pillow at increasing volume. It’s nothing like as gentle as Eddie was with him last time, but Eddie seems to like it like this and Richie will give him anything he wants, fucking anything.

He loops his arm around Eddie’s waist and drags him back up until he’s kneeling on the bed and Eddie is spread across his lap, and Eddie cries out brokenly, tilting his head back against Richie’s shoulder. His throat works as he swallows; from his angle Richie can see his abdominal muscles tensing every time Richie pulls him down, his cock dripping precome.

“Oh, fuck, Richie, oh, fuck oh fuck _fuck—_ ” he moans when Richie reaches down to stroke him. He tucks his face into Richie’s throat and then bites him hard under his jaw, and Richie swears raggedly into his hair and pulls him down and comes so hard that the world goes white around the edges.

Eddie’s mouth is still pressed against his skin when he comes back down from it; his breath is coming hot and quick and he’s trembling, flushed, fucking gorgeous.

“Look at you,” Richie rasps into his ear, tightening his grip and speeding up his strokes, so slicked by precome that he doesn’t need lube at all. “God, look at you, I’m going to be jerking off to this for the rest of my life, you’re so fucking hot, Eds—”

Eddie sobs out a jumbled noise that might be a curse or might be Richie’s name or might be both, grinds down against him, and comes all over Richie’s hand.

They stay like that for several minutes, breathing together, before Richie’s much-abused leg muscles protest.

“Okay, my knees are gonna freeze like this if we don’t move,” he mumbles into Eddie’s hair, and feels Eddie shake with laughter against him. “Can you lift up a little?”

“Not sure my legs work,” Eddie murmurs back, but he shifts up enough for Richie’s softening cock to slip out of him and flops onto the clean part of the mattress while Richie goes to clean off and deal with the condom.

He hesitates after he’s dropped it in the garbage can, eyeing his bag and wondering if etiquette requires him to put some pants on now. Before he can make a decision, Eddie cracks his eyes open to squint at him.

“Are you coming back to bed or what?”

“Are you staying?” Richie asks, relieved.

“Well, I’m definitely not scurrying back to my room bare-ass naked,” Eddie grumbles, and Richie collapses onto the mattress next to him, laughing.

“Okay,” he says, and rolls onto his side to let Eddie flip the blankets over them. “Hey. So, it was good?”

“What gave it away?” Eddie asks him, hilariously cranky.

Richie rests a hand tentatively on his bare hip and finds himself smiling helplessly when Eddie squirms back toward him. “You know, I always figured getting laid would mellow you out some.”

“Maybe I’m cranky because we could have been doing this for a fucking year if we hadn’t forgotten each other,” Eddie says into his shoulder. He doesn’t quite look like he’s trying to hide his face, but he’s definitely not looking at Richie either.

Richie sighs into his hair, then offers his cards on the table, heart in his throat. “Or like twenty years.”

“I didn’t even know I was gay when I was twenty.” Eddie lifts his head though, peers up into Richie’s face, and softens at whatever it is he sees there. “Yeah. If I remembered you back then, yeah.”

“Oh,” Richie breathes.

“But that’s the thing, Rich, we lost so much fucking time. I’m pissed off about that, okay?”

“Okay,” Richie murmurs, and leans down to kiss him, careful and slow. Eddie sighs against his lips and lets him do it. “But we’re here now, right? We’re here now.”

Eddie’s hand settles on his cheek, so gentle that it makes Richie’s throat ache. For a moment he’s suffused with terror that what’s coming next is a let-down as gentle as Eddie can give him, but what Eddie says instead is, “Yeah. We’re here now, and I’m not fucking going anywhere. Okay?”

“Okay,” Richie says. After a pause, he adds, “I mean, we might want to think about leaving this specific bed eventually, but—”

“God, you’re such an asshole,” Eddie says fondly, and rolls away from him to switch the lamp off, throwing the room into darkness cut only by a thin line of sunlight slipping out from under the curtains. He kicks at the blankets, then settles back into Richie’s arms. “Now go the fuck to sleep.”

“Bossy,” Richie murmurs into his hair, but he’s smiling.

* * *

(It’s several hours later when Stan knocks on the door and, finding it unlocked, ducks his head in to ask if Richie knows where Eddie got to. He pauses just inside the door at the sight of two dark heads sharing a pillow, bodies curved toward each other under the blankets like matching quotation marks: Richie’s arm slung over Eddie’s blanket-clad hip, Eddie’s palm resting on Richie’s shoulder.

He blinks at them, then laughs softly and backs out of the room, pulling the door shut behind him.

Later, maybe, he’ll tease them mercilessly. For now, he slips out onto the back porch to dial his house number, the landline that they’re both too old-fashioned to get rid of.

“Hey, babylove,” he says when Patty picks up. “I’ve missed you. Yeah. I’m coming home soon.”)

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on [Tumblr](https://glorious-spoon.tumblr.com/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/glorious_spoon) as glorious_spoon, come say hi! :D


End file.
